…as a pack of programming students hoist up over the cliff’s edge at the top of the mountain to seek counsel from the wise one. Entering his cave in a pack, the first one says:

“I’m having a hard time learning to program. It seems that I’m a visual learner – I need videos to explain it all to me. I hate big, thick books and I hate typing in examples. I try and try, but it just doesn’t sink in.”

Then the second comes forward: “I haven’t found a programming language that I like. No matter how many Object-Oriented languages I try and how many Interactive Development Environments I use, I still have to deal with too many details. I don’t understand why programming can’t be just like building something with Lego blocks.”

A third approaches the master: “To be frank, logic makes me ill. Every time somebody talks about that Boolean stuff, I mentally flee to a beach in the Bahamas where logic was never invented. I have yet to find the programming method that allows me to completely avoid all that logic engineering junk.”

And yet a fourth speaks up: “I’m not comfortable trying anything new. I grew up with a Windows 98 box, and I don’t understand why the whole world can’t stay on Windows and Visual Basic for everything. Every time my manager talks, it’s ‘we’re going to switch to a Ruby on Rails base’ this and ‘you need to re-certify for network programming’ that. I was already quite generous in giving up COBOL and Pascal for Basic, but even that doesn’t seem to satisfy the job market.”

The Guru parts his lips, about to speak, when a fifth proclaims: “I’m scared of open source. Here I studied in college for years, certified in everything, struggled for years to get a safe, secure position with a huge corporation making proprietary software, and now there’s these programmers who are producing a better product than my company can and giving it away for free. I don’t want to earn money through support; I want to earn it for writing code once in my lifetime and getting it over with. I don’t understand why these open-source people can’t see that if we don’t patent and restrict every tiny piece of knowledge everywhere, we’ll never succeed in making software an artificially scarce resource which we can them monopolize and grow rich from.”

While the Guru is absorbing this, a sixth adds his voice: “I hate typing, period. When I text message, I abbreviate. Even that is too much; there should be some buttons and pull-down menus to say everything – after all, nothing I say is that original so about 12 buttons should cover everything I have to say. And it’s just that way with programming; I hate command lines, formatting code, or even discussing questions in a forum. Just recently, I unplugged my keyboard and just threw it away, and now I want to find a programming method that lets me use the mouse 100% of the time.”

The Guru ponders all of the students’ concerns. The students fall silent – they know the reputation of this great and wise oracle of software development, and have made a consensus to abide by his counsel.

The Guru ponders and ponders. After a while,

finally,

he speaks.

He says, “Maybe you all just really hate programming. Have you thought about getting into a different line of work?”

The group gazed with awe at each other and all about them in wonder.

And were enlightened.

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