The Better You Program, The Worse You Communicate
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The Better You Program, The Worse You Communicate
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Re: The Better You Program, The Worse You Communicate
#2Boy is that not true. The key to miscommunication and bad programming is the same: not to be clear in your own head about what you're doing.
Re: The Better You Program, The Worse You Communicate
#3Some well explained thoughts. Overall, I agree with the "gist" of it. :-)
I have experienced something similar, after rather intense stretches of coding, especially when it involved optimization or visualization, ... I sometimes find it difficult to resurface and be verbally expressive and articulate again.
Re: The Better You Program, The Worse You Communicate
#4Boy is that not true. The key to miscommunication and bad programming is the same: not to be clear in your own head about what you're doing.
settings aside what is going on inside your head, ...
The article correctly observes that effective communication in a programming language is very concise, structured, non-repetitive, etc. ... which is quite different from effective communication among humans (imprecise, repetitive, analogy-based, etc.)
Re: The Better You Program, The Worse You Communicate
#5I disagree.
I think that if the average programmer steps out once in a while to communicate with humans and keeps social momentum, he can differentiate between the two.
As a programmer, I don't talk to my friends like they're machines. I do, however, speak pragmatically and logically. I also use common sense.
I do have a little unproven, silly theory that good programmers are able to solve social conflicts easier because of good debugging skills. My life seems to be rather drama-free. I could just be full of shit, though. :)
Re: The Better You Program, The Worse You Communicate
#6Some well explained thoughts. Overall, I agree with the "gist" of it. :-) I have experienced something similar, after rather intense stretches of coding, especially when it involved optimization or visualization, ... I sometimes find it difficult to resurface and be verbally expressive and articulate again.
Same thing happens to me. I just tell everyone I'm "code brained" and sit in a corner until I snap out of it.
Re: The Better You Program, The Worse You Communicate
#7I think a lot of programmers mistakenly use this as an excuse when in reality, they should just get out more :)
Re: The Better You Program, The Worse You Communicate
#8I disagree with the headline.
The site, however gives me "Service Unavailable", which is either bad programming or bad communication.
Re: The Better You Program, The Worse You Communicate
#9Boy is that not true. The key to miscommunication and bad programming is the same: not to be clear in your own head about what you're doing.
I don't know... I'm frequently very clear about what I'm trying to communicate and yet fail to comunicate it. Clarity certainly helps, but communication skills are another thing altogether.
Another part of the problem that he doesn't go into is that in programming, you have to "say" everything you want to say, and what you don't say is irrelevant. In communication, leaving out certain bits can be paramount - and the bits that you do leave out often say as much as the bits you leave in, to an astute interlocutor.
Re: The Better You Program, The Worse You Communicate
#10It's true. The better you program, the worse you are at breathing. The essence of programming is to not repeat yourself. The essence of breathing is repetition. In, out, in, out. QED.