Ballad of a Duck
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Revision as of 05:11, 15 October 2011
Why program?
Why do we bother to write computer programs at all? Surely there must be a reason to undertake such a task. In fact, I believe there to be several.
First and weakest of these I think is our desire to simplify a task. Programming can greatly alleviate the tedium of simple, repetitive processes. I can confidently say I think this is the reason about 99% of computer programs have been written, but also that it's not a particularly strong reason why people have done so and particularly not why they continue to do so.
Existing tools do such a good (or at last competent) job of this that there is little continuing reason to program such tools from the ground up. In fact, many programming tasks amount to just slightly modifying these existing solutions.
