Programming difficulty

[RCBH928]

i hardly know much about programming
but i know it is frustrating enough for me.

I was wondering how long does it take to build a program , of course this differs from an OS to something that would display ur name on screen, but....

supposed a team of 5 programmers building a word processor from scratch, how long will it take to build something like Mellel or WordPerfect

[Hatta]

Programming is a highly skilled profession. Openoffice.org is an open source wordprocessing suite. They list 880 contributors, probably since 2001, and they are still playing catch up with Microsoft Office. Of course, most of those are not full time employees, but that still underscores the kind of effort it takes to make a high quality suite of software.

You've got to take baby steps. Try contributing patches to an open source project to get your feet wet.

[Pullmyfinger]

It would vary depending on how skilled the programmers are, how well they work as a team, how much time was spent designing the project, how much time the commit to it and probably most of all, are they getting paid or is it a side project?

[MrPopo]

A "word processor" is a very nebulous concept. Notepad can be considered a bare bones word processor, with things like Word on the other end of the spectrum. But let me try and give you a real world example from my office. My team wrote a service where a client can send a message requesting an item attribute, for example the title of a book. The service receives the message, queries a database, and returns the requested attribute to the client. It has no GUI and the message framework was off-the-shelf for my team; we didn't need to code it from scratch. It took two developers about 2.5-3 months to get it up and running. When you figure in meetings each developer had about 4-6 hours per weekday that they spent on it. So for professional software engineers it was a 600 man-hour project.

[RCBH928]

I was wondering because I see a lot of great free programs on the web that are done by 1 or 2 people, plus let us not forget , great stuff started with 1-2 people like Yahoo and Youtube.

I was wondering how difficult is it to get something working. And suppose I need a custom software for a special need. Is it really that difficult

[blackmagepwns]

I'm not sure if anyone can really explain in full the difficulties of writing code. There are so many different variables that you have to include into the work such as if it was a full time thing, how many people and thier own experience with coding, etc.

It's just something you have to try for yourself, I am, and it is rather difficult writing javascript but I do however find it very rewarding if it is your thing.

[gtmtnbiker]

The best thing to do is think of a small thing that you want to do and then build upon it.

[Anapan]

Even more important than actually coding the program is completely understanding what you need done and how to implement it. Like gtmtnbiker said, keep it simple to begin with and build on functions as necessary. Once you know every chunk of data that has to be stored and processed, you can work in small steps to make the computer do what you want. Most of those awesome freeware programs started simply to do one thing well, and were optimized (sometimes over years) until they became the best most complete solution to make the computer do something.

[RCBH928]

thanx every one
but there are companies/individuals that will build custom programs if I wanted so, right?
Supposedly for business reasons maybe if you were wondering

[blackmagepwns]

I can't think of any names at the moment, but I do know there are some people out there that will build anything you want.