Any article like this always has to the the “Can you help with my printer?”
Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers
131–140 of 334 posts
Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a somewhat harsh take. I've met plenty of programmers also set in their ways in that C or Python is the only language needed and that concurrency or functional programming is "hard" and thus not worth learning. Whereas I find concurrency and functional programming, given the correct language for it like F#, LabVIEW, Elixir, etc., is easy and manageable. It just all depends on context and experience and additi…
Keep in mind that "unix knowledge" doesn't mean knowing bash scripting, but understanding a bit about the shell is the key part. You worked on windows, but you probably know about environment variables, how they are passed around, what PATH is, how to list files in a directory, cd around, copy/delete files, redirect, pipe and how to use git given your profession. Isn't that the case? I've been on Windows and learned…
I think that not knowing how to use PATH or environment variables is something that can be fixed in like 15 minutes maximum. You just explain it to junirs and that is about it.
Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing I learned in my 41 years is that nobody thinks like me (or you). It's not that I 'think better' or that I am 'better at thinking'. But sometimes I deal with variables that I can't correctly communicate or translate. I often think that people deals with the same information as me, and will follow my same path of reasoning. Perhaps the dev thought it should be a tool that you will be using every day, or a thi…
Building the long-term solution first is often wrong even when you need one. I use the quick and dirty method until I know I'll do that task more regularly and I know enough about the problem so I don't need to make wild guesses about the design.
Not everyone do that tho. And that includes pretty good senior engineers I work with.
Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers
#134I find a version of this even with fresh out of college programmers. They just know how to type Java on an IDE, maybe some SQL (using some graphical front end), some HTML/CSS. They can't operate in a Linux dev environment at all, can't use the command line or exit vi or perform any kind of simple shell based automation or use git without a plugin for their IDE. And they also are reluctant to learn because they are se…
> I find a version of this even with fresh out of college programmers. I've noticed something with boot camp programmers too. Something that may have changed is that newer graduates may have studied programming because "it pays well", and not because they were computer hobbyists before deciding what to study. I've been on meetings with some programmers that didn't know how to use a gui ftp client or how to manually u…
Last time I used ftp was years and years ago. I really dont think newbies should be expected to know it.
Also, it is ok and to be expected for fresh graduates to have only knowledge in most important areas for them. Even people who want to learn a lot more then necessary are better off focusing on learning more in the immediate area they will actually use at first.
Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a somewhat harsh take. I've met plenty of programmers also set in their ways in that C or Python is the only language needed and that concurrency or functional programming is "hard" and thus not worth learning. Whereas I find concurrency and functional programming, given the correct language for it like F#, LabVIEW, Elixir, etc., is easy and manageable. It just all depends on context and experience and additi…
Keep in mind that "unix knowledge" doesn't mean knowing bash scripting, but understanding a bit about the shell is the key part. You worked on windows, but you probably know about environment variables, how they are passed around, what PATH is, how to list files in a directory, cd around, copy/delete files, redirect, pipe and how to use git given your profession. Isn't that the case? I've been on Windows and learned…
I understand your point about Unix knowledge not requiring shell scripting experience, but I have always thought that POSIX shells are rather an important part of the Unix interface that I feel like I can't separate the two. Of course, you can do mostly everything that is in bash in other languages (and certainly there are one too many pain points in bash) but I feel less knowledgeable not knowing shell scripting. For me, learning how to shell-script to some capacity has opened my understanding a lot about what I am working on.
I took this opinion towards some presentations for co-workers and their came back to me saying that they have gotten, even if a glimpse, a broader sense what can be done. That really transcends a bit from the hot-new-tech rush, because these bits are foundational, in one way or another, to our unix/linux/bsd systems.
Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers
#136I want to point out two additional observations. 1. There are a decent amount of software engineers or programmers whom literally aged at the perfect time to organically learn these tools that later became fundamental. If you even touched a computer from the 60s to the late nineties in a engineering aspect at all, you were bound to have worked in a terminal, worked on computers with a single core, worked on computers…
I am the first to graduate college and to go into software. I learned a lot on my own before studying Computer Science, and still do after. I can agree that people tend to quickly get condescending ("just google it") instead of giving keywords ("I think you are looking for X, Y, Z, try to read about them and come back when you have specific questions"). IMO the latter is constructive, the former is discouraging. The…
> This said, many beginners think that their first project can be a complex application even though they don't know how to write code. The constructive comment for them is "start small, learn the language first", but of course many beginners don't take that as an answer. Beginners need to accept that learning software engineering takes time and dedication.
That is just a phase, it is normal and nothing new even. I remember a lot of people of my generation whose idea of first project was the single player shooter with storyline and RPG like skills tree. Obviously they all failed. But I also think that they did learned a lot by trying or just reading up on it.
I think that for a complete beginner, whatever is motivating and fun for you, you will learn a lot from it. Because motivating and fun means you will keep going and keep learning. That is better in the long run then theoretically super effective start that will just make you bored and unmotiavted.
Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers
#137Literally everything I write is in Markdown because it’s so simple to me. I use it for blogposts, presentations, documentation, todos, internet comments. But this article doesn’t strike a chord with me. The author fails to understand that it seems easy to us because we’re familiar with it. Of course we know how to transform it into PDF or HTML. But this knowledge isn’t basic, and it’s understandable that people want…
I would use Visidata [0] and get it done before excel finished importing the csv file.
Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers
#138Slight tangent from the original post: I wish "normal" people were more tech-literate. I don't think they realize just how much of their autonomy they've given up by choosing to use Microsoft Products/Reddit/Twitter/Spotify/Facebook/TikTok/Apple Products/ etc. We're at a point where now the average person depends on several layers of technology that they can't even conceive of, and often the companies building that t…
The reason is we only have so little time and yet so much to do. For the vast majority of people, understanding technology is simply not worth their time. They have other, more important things to worry about. You don't know nor care to understand how telephones and cars and electricity work. Nor how and where the food in the supermarket comes from. Water comes out of the faucet because faucets dispense water. You ha…
There's a (few) meta-level(s) for this. They should recognize the value of, and accordingly advocate for, having more "hackable/discoverable/understandable tech environments/contexts". And not necessarily for themselves.
The post opens with the classic just brew install blah, and immediately runs into the problem of people not having brew (or some other package manager) preinstalled and ready on their computers. It's the walled garden problem.
And it's not a trivial problem. And even this meta-level argument is not necessarily straightforward, because it comes with serious trade-offs.
And .... unfortunately even one level up, where it should be straightforward to see how a walled garden monopoly is bad (as the consensus on rent-seeking being bad is pretty strong in economics) people mostly don't care about this issue, because they don't connect it to the value of "more power user freedom".
People start to see the value of right to repair tractors, people see the value of the first sale doctrine, people see themselves as temporarily embarrased rich gentlefolk, but they are afraid to see themselves as just a few commands away from a power user.
Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers
#139Similarly, many non-programmers can do tasks that some programmers must hire a professional for (like repair drywall, install a ceiling fan, basic car maintenance, etc). Empathy is one of those skills that is as, or more, valuable than any particular programming language.
Empathy, but also boundaries.
If someone asks for help it's important to tell them that sure, we can help, but "IT support" tends to be a lot less like "help me assemble this furniture from IKEA", and a lot more like "sure, let's install the ceilig fan, but oh it turns out the ceiling is cursed and now we have pierced the heavens and for 30 days every midnight you'll be visited by the mailer daemon, also we need the address of your first born, just a mere formality, you know, no biggie".
People has to recognize that in many cases there are no easy solutions for "them", even if it's easy for "us", because it depends on their willingness/ability/capacity to learn new things, which in general is a hard thing in tech.
Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers
#140This can be a simple frequency-of-use issue. Non-programmers might need a command-line solution once or twice a year. It's hard to remember a series of steps that you don't frequently perform.
For example, you can theoretically know how to change a tire, or how to use Photoshop to replace a color in an image, or how to troubleshoot a printer. But you only run through that series of steps occasionally, when there's a specific problem to solve.