[cheald]

Programming is hard, because it requires a mode of thinking and a level of mental discipline that most people just simply don't possess. Humans think in abstracts; computers deal in specifics.

As long as this is true, programming will be "hard", because until I can program a computer like the Holodeck by speaking to it and having it infer my intent, I will have to be specific about what I want to do, and this is not something that people are used to doing. It takes training to learn to think like a computer, and that will be fully necessary until computers learn to think like us.