A small snag.....
My wife of many years has a bit of a love/hate relationship with computers (mostly hate, actually). We've had them at home since about 1980 and the novelty quickly wore off when she realized that she had to adapt her way of working to the machine rather than the other way around. Because she, as a teacher, knows about "computers" she got tapped to go on innumerable courses to learn all sorts of computery things, whatever people thought was what you needed to teach kids so the would be ready for the Bright New Age that was dawning. Despite all this immersion, though, she confided to me that while she knew the standard programming moves -- statements and control functions in the language du jour -- she never quite figured out how to program, how to marshal a problem so it could be implemented on a computer. Since this is something I've been doing for ever it wasn't easy to explain, either -- its been described as a "knack", its one of those things that is either blindingly obvious or completely opaque. (It doesn't help that I find a lot of program code confusing and opaque myself -- sure, its syntactically correct, at least the compiler thought so, but the logic's convoluted, the data's disorganized and there's too many wrappers on wrappers.)
So there you have it. Any experienced programmer will tell you that the coding bit is easy. Its knowing what to code that will get you. (A lot of programming may be copy and paste but it will only get you so far.)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
