Most technical professions require a certain level of programming these days. One needn’t be proficient, but one simply can’t get away by saying they wouldn’t want to deal with any kind of code - at least that’s how it goes in technical fields like engineering and science (in fact, programming may also be required in the more artistically inclined fields like professional video animation, graphic design, etc. depending on what one wants to achieve).

But when you have a lot of code just being there in front of you - with you staring at the code, and it staring back at you - it could get really frustrating. It’s just text, composed of the same characters that enable you to read these sentences and make coherent sense out of them - but at the same time there’s something much deeper at play in code.

The programmer’s mind.

If there’s anything we get to know over the years, it’s that we don’t understand ourselves or our fellow humans. But at the same time, we do understand in hindsight what probably was going through someone’s head, or what state of life they were in at a certain point in time, when we come across some kind of creation by them around that period. The same goes with programming, albeit in a more general rather than temporal sense.

Programming involves algorithms, usage of specific data structures, commenting code, documentation, automation, and a lot of such intricacies - and naturally, there’s no one way to go about it. Some programmers overautomate (you don’t really need a script to copy three files from one directory to another) while some undercomment (write 4 layers of nested loops with i,j,k,l as your loop variables and see if you understand your own code 4 hours from now) - each has their style or footprint. It’s really fascinating/frustrating to see and understand code written by someone else depending on how clearly the code speaks to you.

But when you don’t understand it, the staring game begins.

And goes on.

Until you email the developer just to find out that there was a bug that was fixed later and now you’re suddenly rethinking your rationalizations of buggy code. But hey, maybe it did make sense?