The Universe Is Winning
With regards to programming is hard: tough. Look, some people are creative geniuses in art and music but there’s no great cry for paint-by-numbers so we can all be amateur Rembrandts. Others have a gift of learning languages but as hard as Rosetta Stone tries, some people just aren’t wired to be adept at multilinguistics. I could go on – oratory, teaching, etc. For a dose of it, read some of the comments on the post, some of them get it. Some people just understand how to do it – I do. I’ve been coding in various languages since 1981-1982 (BASIC, Forth, Pascal, C, C++, C#, Java, Ada, Fortran, Assembly, Lisp, Smalltalk, PHP, Objective-C, Python, Perl, etc.) and I get the mechanics, the programming language is just a construct and “translating” or picking up a new one isn’t hard for me. There are some environments that provide easy programming with drag-and-drop components that author the code behind the scenes. I’ve worked with “expert systems” that use english-like syntax for coding and a graphic programming method. But in the end, the real challenge is understanding how to take apart a problem into something that you can have a computer do for you and then how do you implement that smartly. There’s a quote that I have used in the past:
Programmers are in a race with the Universe to create bigger and better idiot-proof programs, while the Universe is trying to create bigger and better idiots. The Universe is winning.
![GorT](https://3.14.242.153/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Gort_Firing.jpg)
GorT is an eight-foot-tall robot from the 51ˢᵗ Century who routinely time-travels to steal expensive technology from the future and return it to the past for retroinvention. The profits from this pay all the Gormogons’ bills, including subsidizing this website. Some of the products he has introduced from the future include oven mitts, the Guinness widget, Oxy-Clean, and Dr. Pepper. Due to his immense cybernetic brain, GorT is able to produce a post in 0.023 seconds and research it in even less time. Only ’Puter spends less time on research. GorT speaks entirely in zeros and ones, but occasionally throws in a ڭ to annoy the Volgi. He is a massive proponent of science, technology, and energy development, and enjoys nothing more than taking the Czar’s more interesting scientific theories, going into the past, publishing them as his own, and then returning to take credit for them. He is the only Gormogon who is capable of doing math. Possessed of incredible strength, he understands the awesome responsibility that follows and only uses it to hurt people.