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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 gianni@lemmy.ml to c/programming@programming.dev

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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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[–] z00s@lemmy.world 10 points 9 months ago

I'm not in IT but used to work with a very old terminal based data storage and retrieval system.

If the original programmers had implemented a particular feature, it was very easy to enter a command and have it spit out the relevant info.

But as times changed, the product outgrew its original boundaries, and on a regular basis clients would ask for specific info that would require printing out decades worth of data before searching and editing it to get what the client wanted.

I can not tell you how many times I heard the phrase, "Can't you just push a button or something and get the information now??"

The thing that infuriated me the most was the idea that somehow we could do that, but didn't want to, as if there was some secret button under the desk that we could push for our favourite clients. Ugh.