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What are the craziest misconceptions you’ve heard about programming from people not familiar with it? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/programming

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As someone who spends time programming, I of course find myself in conversations with people who aren't as familiar with it. It doesn't happen all the time, but these discussions can lead to people coming up with some pretty wild misconceptions about what programming is and what programmers do.

I'm sure many of you have had similar experiences. So, I thought it would be interesting to ask.

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[–] [email protected] 73 points 9 months ago (4 children)

I'm pretty sure that government software always blows because they think software can be written according to a fixed schedule and budget

It's tempting to think it's like building a house, and if you have the blueprints & wood, it'll just be fast and easy. Everything will go on schedule

But no, in software, the "wood" is always shape shifting, the land you're building on is shape shifting, some dude in Romania is tryna break in, and the blueprints forgot that you also need plumbing and electric lines

[–] [email protected] 43 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Well, that’s probably true for the most part but by far the reality is that it comes down to lowest bidder 9/10 times. Unrealistic budgets and unrealistic time frames with as cheap labor they can find gets you a large amount of government funded projects throughout all the years.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago

One of the most common problems of government or other big organisation software is that they don't scale, either "not well" or "not at all".

Some guy hacks up a demo that looks nice and seems to do what customer wants, but then it turns out a) that it only allows for (number of open ports on one machine) users at the same time, and b) it only works if everything runs on one machine. Or worse, one core.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago

It's tempting to think it's like building a house, and if you have the blueprints & wood, it'll just be fast and easy. Everything will go on schedule

it never goes according to schedule eve if there is blueprint & wood

[–] ericjmorey 14 points 9 months ago

Building a house (or any construction project) is notoriously impossible to be on schedule and on budget too.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I have a hypothesis that a factor is that government needs to work for everyone.

A private company can be like "we only really support chrome", but even people running ie6 at a tiny resolution need to renew their license.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

I believe this is usually covered by the fact that you can do just about anything you need to do over mail. I once ran into a government site that only worked on Edge.