9 things Programmers know, but most people don’t

Have you ever wondered what made Computer Programmers stand out, or had questions about their lifestyle?. A question was asked in a Quora thread about what they know but most people don’t. Quora has a community of active programmers and developers, so this question was answered by over a hundred of them. Here are the thoughts and opinions of the best nine answers.

1.That the simply looking Google homepage contains a lot more code (even after obfuscation) than most colourful websites. – Kingsley Adio

2. “Programming” is thinking, not typing. Most of programming is spent sleeping, walking around, staring out the window, or doing anything else that helps you relax and think. – Casey Patton

3. Your ISP (Internet Service Provider) is not the only one to blame every time you face slow internet connection or delay in page loading. – Shamik Kundu

4. When you tell someone that you’re a programmer they assume you can fix all of their computer related problems. This happens to me most of the time. I keep getting questions. Being a programmer doesn’t mean that we can solve all the computer related problems. – Dharmesh Dhakan

5. Most people think “hackers” are socially inept teenagers toying away with their cool gadgets trying to break into NASA. Though the word “hackers” has been demeaned by the media, it represents people who like to build constructive things. – Tushar Sharma

6. Programming is basically of two kinds:
Application programming: Programming in which developers use the system’s capabilities (API) to expand the scope and meet user’s requirement. This requires a lot of thinking along with a lot of typing.
System Programming: This is like Rocket science, this involves more thinking, brainstorming than typing.

Typically in application programming, most of the time is spent on fixing what was written badly or what was not expected to happen. Core development takes only 30% of the time, 70% is spent in activities that follow i.e. Code Reviews, QA / Testing cycles, bug fixing, release preparation.

There’re a Trillion ways by which an application or a program can go wrong, but there are only a handful ways by which it can go right. –Tarandeep Singh

7. You could learn everything about programming online, and have a potentially better understanding then those who go to university for it, but you’d actually consider 4 years and ?XK debt to be a reasonable alternative.

Programming has nothing to do with the internet, which is literally a collection of wires in the ocean that span across the world. -Anonymous

8. Most programmers haven’t built any software from scratch. –Vibhu Rishi

9. Finally, Ron Gross speaks for me and the programming public:

Open Source doesn’t mean anyone can edit the source code.
The true meaning of the word Logic.
There are dozens of programming languages in use, and hundreds that aren’t.
Building a website or a program is hard work.
The entire field of programming radically changes every 4 years.
Doing simple tasks like “browsing the internet” have a dozen of different layers under the hood … and good programmers actually understand all the different layers (it’s truly a miracle that these layers do work correctly … usually).
The day to day job of most programmers has little to do with what you learn when you get a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science.
Just because you’re a programmer it doesn’t mean you can figure out why their MS. Word crashed right now.
That some tasks might be solvable by a computer in theory, but in practice would take more time than the universe has been alive!