David H. Burns wrote:
>> It is fundamentally difficult. 
> I disagree strongly!

How much do you know about it?

It's fundamentally difficult in that each line of a program does something 
new. If it wasn't new, it would already be finished and you'd just use it.

Building a 51-story office building is marginally harder than building a 
50-story office building.  Building a 51-million LOC program is not 2% 
harder than building a 50-million LOC program, because each of those new 
lines is something brand new, doing something never before done in that 
program, and needs to get plugged in. If it wasn't, it would still be a 
50-million LOC program with handfuls of calls to existing subroutines.

By the way, adding that appropriate handful of calls to existing subroutines 
is the area in which OOP powerful. If you don't understand the benefits of 
OOP, it's because you've never written a program difficult enough to need it.

>> It's as fundamentally difficult as any applied mathematics. 
> I disagree here too. I would say that programming is less difficult that 
> much
> of applied mathematics. 

*All* of programming *is* applied mathematics.

> And applied mathematics is in general not fundamentally difficult.

Sure. That's why they teach it in grade school.

>> Then why do you have such a hard time understanding simple things like 
>> OO programs? :-)
> 
> They do not seem very simple to me,

Yet, oddly enough, hundreds of thousands of professional programmers seem to 
manage it all the time, in spite of you claiming it's not particularly 
difficult.

> but it may be that I am wrong and that my attitude has, so far, 
> kept me from diving into OOP,
> which in reality is relatively easy. :)

Or, maybe, you're just not very good at programming, so anytime you look at 
something big enough to be difficult, you decide it's not really because 
it's difficult or you're incapable, but because everyone else in the whole 
world is lying to you for selfish ends?

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."

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