[TeMPOraL]

Printing is hard primarily because of misaligned business incentives, which form a bubble of suck that's eerily resilient to market optimization.

Automating programming definitely seems like an easier target in comparison.

[XorNot]

Printing works really well. It's print drivers (software) that are an utter and complete mess.

I've never had a printer that didn't work: I've had plenty that wanted the correct offering to the HP website to be made and several hundred megs of adware installed before a postscript file made it to the actual hardware.