David H. Burns wrote:
> OK. I admit it programming is hard -- a lot harder than I imagined. It's 
> much
> harder than it used to be, but why?

1) Your programs are bigger. (For example, my Linux boot partition won't 
even fit in the address space that CP/M used to allow for a disk drive.)

2) Your programs are way more complex. You're not writing to the screen and 
reading from the keyboard any more. Note that stdio programs are just as 
easy as they used to be.

3) Your programs depend on a lot more than they used to. You have all kinds 
of libraries to do all kinds of things you wouldn't have dreamed of when you 
were using an 8-bit computer. You can't port OpenGL to a Z80.

4) Most importantly: Each line of code interacts with other lines of code. 
Building 20 houses is 20 times as hard (or less) than building one house. 
Building a program 20,000 lines long is much harder than 20x the effort for 
a 1,000 line program.

> Does this make difficult programming inevitable. 

Only if you want to take advantage of it. Find an old copy of MS-DOS, boot 
it, and suddenly programming will be easy again.

> I suppose it does;
> at least it is so and little can be done about it. But I'm not 
> altogether convinced that this should
> make it so difficult for me programming on my own computer largely for 
> my own use and not
> really caring whether I'm connected to the internet all the time.

Whether you're connected to the internet is irrelevant for your own 
programs, unless you're using the internet.

-- 
   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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