81–90 of 143 posts
Funny thing is, coding today is mostly understanding how other devs solved a problem. We're using frameworks and libraries that all come with very specific solutions.
Even cutting edge research or new developments in any field are built on lifetimes of other people’s work. It’s always been that way, and it’s one of the things that allowed us to prosper as a species.
a question I like to ask to my reports is "are you solving a problem or are you solving a puzzle?" puzzles are neat! They're a lot of fun! But we shouldn't mistake puzzles for problems. Just because something isn't right or doesn't fit together doesn't mean that it matters. You can do great engineering work coming up with beautiful solutions, making order and beauty out of something that doesn't work quite right but…
Aren't puzzles a subclass of problems? Isn't a problem simply a question that has a solution? It made me think about the definition of the word problem. Here is one list: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/problem
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Other than medical problems the rest aren’t necessarily real and could be seen as learned habits. We “make up” problems and invent solutions at scale for people to abide social norms of needing a job. Feeding oneself and learning about the world is work enough. We don’t need all these “jobs”. It’s social control at scale. Necessary evil, but we can do it differently now.
Hypothetical problems are still problems, and they still can be solved. I think the best case of that is the tower of Hanoi. Most abstract problems are made up, here is one: If you add something to itself, what do you get? I just made that up. The solution is: you get twice of that something. With that said, I disagree that these problems are made up. I can see that it is the case in some cases or the majority cases…
Our framework for solving them, of anointing experts undemocratically who are afforded special say in solving localized trade disputes and creating a market for casual babysitting of adult emotions is pandering to selling frameworks of agency that are outdated.
Historically it was a matter of literal ability to educate and train at scale not existing. It does now.
Law as we know it is hundreds of years old and obviously not working for the species.
Psychology is rapidly being superseded by “take this pill”.
We don’t need to cling to old solutions to problems.
YouTube broke while trying to fingerprint a legal debate of copyright, it became a circular mess. It’s obvious how we’re repeating ourselves: Dems quietly inflate inequality & keep political prisoners, the GOP gaudily so. Enjoy your exceptional legal system.
Sure there’s some psychology, the basics, that “normalize” folks through curve fitting responses. There’s a shit ton of terrible, useless frameworks out there, many do more harm than good. I’d prefer to put my money on a pill then that normalizes my brain as I design rather than some experts favorite rhetorical mess.
I think this article constructs a strawman argument – pretty much all developers are solving some sort of problem. The big question is who you're solving problems for – when I was a single person doing freelance web work (like this article seems to assume), I was always solving problems for customers and their clients. Once I started working with other developers, I became interested in solving their problems too – s…
I don't think it's a strawman at all. E.g., I've seen plenty of code where the problem the developers are solving is "I'm bored with work" or "I don't like my boss yelling at me about the deadline". As an example, I was once brought in to help sort out a build pipeline. It was quirky, unreliable, and mysterious to the team using it. I dug in and it was built around Docker 0.8. But not even the official Docker 0.8; th…
Junior devs solve computer problems using computers. Senior devs solve business problems using computers.
s/Novice/Junior Dev/, s/Master/Senior Dev/
Depends on the language. I find that in C++, I spend a lot of time working on figuring out the language, while in python I spend far more time solving the actual problem.
I don't know what it is about the tech industry but it really seems to think highly of itself and is constantly self congratulatory.
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You are missing the point. As is almost everyone else who says this stuff. Most of us get paid to write software other people have requested in order to solve their problems. Every problem software solves can be solved by a sea of pencil pushers or factory line workers or human calculators or office clerks with filing cabinets or telephone switchboard operators or typists. The world used to run that way. It no longer…
> Every problem software solves can be solved by a sea of pencil pushers or factory line workers or human calculators or office clerks with filing cabinets or telephone switchboard operators or typists. The world used to run that way. I know what you mean, but this is the wrongest thing I've seen in quite a while! Because it ignores performance. Try implementing a video game with human clerks.
Pinball is certainly a precursor to video games; there's other low-impact games of manual dexterity like ring toss/bocce/..., darts/target shooting. Choose your own adventure books/pencil and paper role-playing/wargames obviously predate computer gaming -- the computer just runs a timer maybe and acts as the gamemaster.
People have been playing various forms of puzzle solitaire with cards for years; Bejewelled or whatever could be done with a custom deck. Minesweeper is not different in kind from the old logic game Mastermind. Even something like Tetris seems new, but I think is similar fundamentally to a tabletop game like Boggle: randomized input + a timer to find solutions -- the geometrical nature of Tetris is kinda just an implementation detail.
But I would venture that the number of problems that are only quantitatively different -- i.e., faster -- because of computers utterly dwarfs the number that are qualitatively different, or even impossible without them.
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> I'd argue that any creative process can be coined as a problem-solving exercise Problem solving with real-world constraints = engineering Problem solving without any constraints = art
This is reminiscent of the old divide between mathematics and philosophy: true and useful = math true and useless = philosophy
"It is not possible to justify the life of any genuine professional mathematician on the ground of the 'utility' of his work." (G. H. Hardy, 1940)