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What real life bad habits has programming given you?

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Re: What real life bad habits has programming given you?

#32

Post by BeefingJection »

Hexstream wrote: post #14
paulgb wrote: post #2

I've caught myself thinking of time in complexity classes. Eg. should I walk or drive? It doesn't matter, they're both O(n).

Walking would be O(n^2) for all but the shortest distances actually, I think. Unless you rested once in a while. Amortized linear time?

How do you figure?

Re: What real life bad habits has programming given you?

#33

Post by run4yourlives »

lallysingh wrote: post #25
run4yourlives wrote: post #11

It's over developed my already prevalent logical thinking. This is great because I'm known as a clear thinker that can solve complex problems, but I've found that a lot of people have difficulty thinking in these terms, preferring to remain in a more emotional pattern. End result is that it harder to relate to more and more people, which remains important. I'd imagine this happens to most programmers, although I don'…

Worst bits: - You can tell someone the answer to their problem, and they just stare at you, confused, while their emotions have to deflate. - When you realize you're talking more abstractly than they can understand. - Or they argue really basic stuff, as they've never been exposed to it. E.g. language alters thought. It's like talking to some sort of organic thing instead of what you think of as normal. Perhaps later…

Actually, the worst part is thinking there's something wrong with them, when in reality you're the weird one. :-)

Re: What real life bad habits has programming given you?

#35

Post by cabalamat »

nihilocrat wrote: post #28
petercooper wrote: post #23

I learned to program when I was really young and I can't help but think that it gave me my OCD. A bit of CBT and some "mindhacks" of my own have almost got rid of it now though. Another one I had as a kid was writing the number zero with a line through it. That's how it was on the BBC Micro and my schoolteachers couldn't understand why I wrote it that way too. I guess another one is being a major advocate of US Engli…

For God's sake, don't use our punctuation rules. # Carefree means "free from care or anxiety." (American style) # Carefree means "free from care or anxiety". (British style) That has bugged me so much that, unless it is being proofread, I intentionally use British-style quotes.

One of the nice things about the English language is the difference between U.S. and UK rules, so you can mix and match them to your own taste and people can't tell you you're doing it wrong.

So for example I write "center" not "centre" but "axe" not "ax".

Re: What real life bad habits has programming given you?

#36

Post by haasted »

Have a condition where I always need to carry some single-day use medical equipment around.

I have created a mental invariant that says that unused, spare units are in my right back-pocket, the one that is currently in use is in the left front pocket, while the left back-pocket is for trash.

This allows me to easily "poll" for whether I'm equipped to leave home, and has made sure that I have not once in 15 years found myself without it. I attribute the success of this system largely to my "programmer mindset".

Re: What real life bad habits has programming given you?

#37

Post by tlrobinson »

nihilocrat wrote: post #30
andreyf wrote: post #6

Constantly wondering if people mean `or' or `xor' (I mean xor)

I find it's most often people say "or" when they mean xor, and "and/or" when they mean or. So perhaps we should start saying either "or" or "ior" (inexclusive or).

The "and/or" thing actually sort of makes sense if you take "or" to mean "xor", since (A XOR B) OR (A AND B) equals (A OR B)

Re: What real life bad habits has programming given you?

#39

Post by bmelton »

Not so much that programming has given me, but constantly having to come up with analogies to explain highly technical concepts to my non-technical co-workers has invaded my life.

"See, your username and password are like a combination lock, where the Kerberos ticket is a key. When you authenticate to the portal, you hand the key to the website, which validates it, and lets you in... but the key is actually in your browser, so it does that all transparently."

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