2026-07-09

I Am Just Not a Good Programmer

• rant
• professional complainer

Haskell, My Moby Dick

I have officially bounced off of Haskell again for the second time. I was following a UPenn undergraduate course but despite having a bachelor’s in computer science and 7 years of software development experience I am too stupid for this. In the current age where LLMs are jingling answer keys in front of my grubby fingers I can’t help reaching for them over and over agai and as a result my brain has turned to mush.

I was looking at other courses on the UPenn CS department website and found an undergraduate capstone that was done on something to do with probabalistic programming languages and Baynesian theory applied to sports betting.

What on earth are they feeding those kids in the Northeast??????

You know what my final project was in the upper level C++ class I took during my undergrad?

Making Tic-Tac-fucking-Toe.

My public state school was for idiots (which is to be expected in Arizona) and because I was/am an idiot I fit in there perfectly (as in it was semi-appropriate for my level. I didn’t fit in in the conventional sense). I genuinely found undergrad to be one of the hardest things I have ever done but I guess it was entirely a skill issue.

An LLM can do anything I can do because I don’t specialize in anything except for mediocre programming and slightly-above-mediocre debugging skills and that’s that. I exist in the underclass of programmers that do not get FAANG/Mag7 jobs and instead work invisibily. Don’t get me wrong, I really do enjoy my job (and do not think I am entitled to it/any job!) but I have no idea why they hired me. I have zero redeeming coding qualities and I just sit there trying to find out what the fuck is going on because it feels like everyone is good at this shit except for me.

Which maybe explains why I am not good at learning Haskell. I know it’s a me problem. All of this is. Other students in my undergrad got jobs at Amazon, etc., I just did not have that dawg in me.

Time to become a professional dog walker, I guess.