Programming Isn’t Just Typing

There’s a lot more to programming than just typing.

Somebody once said, probably jokingly, that what I was doing amounted to nothing more than typing.  It might have been one of those things where they say, “I’m joking,” afterward to keep me from being offended.  The first time it was said, it was funny.  The next few times, it lost a bit of humor.  After more than a dozen times, I have a hard time faking a smile.

The point here is that programming follows the 80/20 rule: 80% thinking and/or planning, and about 20% actually programming.  The typing part is actually a really small part… of that 20% programming part, about 80% of it ends up being debugging and testing.