15 Facts About Programming You Probably Did Not Know

The task of programming is becoming increasingly common, but there are still many facts that people do not know about programmers and programming itself. This post features 15 little known facts about programming.
Like other intellectual activities, the task of programming and how people learn to program computers is well studied. In fact, with more and more people learning to program regardless of language, tool or platform used, it is natural that few people actually know about certain important facts about programming and software development.
From an academic standpoint, the areas of software engineering and education bring forward several very interesting studies obtained by experiments whose results are presented in masters’ and PhD theses. And based on these results I chose the facts mentioned in this post along with appropriate references. By the way, if you got interested to know more about each of the points discussed here I strongly recommend seeking the complete reference for more information.
Based on this context, I will present 15 important facts that, unfortunately, are little known by whom programs. But before, a warning: these facts present results of experimental and empirical research that have specific contexts. What I mean is that there is some room for discussion of the applicability and generalization, but knowing what has already been discovered and studied is important and, at least, can instigate discussion and how close that information is to the reality of the reader.

1) Developers slow to ask for help when facing problems

2) Programmers have a tendency to report their problems incompletely

3) Developers seek other forms of help before talking to coworkers

4) Progress in programming can be classified into 4 stages

5) Developers find beatable and unbeatable barriers

6) There are 6 types of barriers related to programming

7) Programmers spend approximately 30% of the time surfing the source code

8) Remote programmer productivity is lower than the productivity of local programmers

9) Most programmers are white, young & male

10) The main error messages, execution times and runtime compilation errors and the average time to solve them

11) The software maintenance consumes more than 50% of the effort

12) The software maintenance consumes between 40% and 90% of costs

13) The work of software maintenance is divided into 4 basic tasks

14) Costs of fixing bugs after implementation are 10 times higher than construction phase and 100 times larger than design phase

15) Peer code review can discover up to 60% of bugs