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Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers

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Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers

#141

Post by flandish »

logn wrote: post #118
flandish wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I currently work with senior engs who are really more like reworked mech engs. Who want to use old versions of eclipse, on win8, install new copies of the same for diff projects, want the new associate level engs (23yo, first job, etc) to write plugins for that old eclipse so the shipped plugins that break due to age still work. Because they dont know svn command line, or how to merge without the plugin. Won’t migrat…

Perhaps these devs prefer the "fix it ship it" mode and don't see the value of learning particular skills. I find it a balancing act to be pragmatic and it involves being skeptical about investing time learning new tech. With everything there is to possibly learn, you have to ignore almost all of it... until (at the latest) it's industry standard in the niche you specialize in and then you have to be open minded that…

Solid thoughts - I neglected to let on that in my case the seniors lament about how new tech sucks, like python being just another perl… etc. They are “tear down prove it to me while I call things retarded” sometimes.

Thats where mgmt should step in. Its really only a couple people.

Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers

#142

Post by cushychicken »

I wrote an essay once that was nominally about using Pysimplegui to get folks to use your software, but is really about understanding ways to make your software accessible to people without your level of coding ability:

https://cushychicken.github.io/python-guis-for-heretics/

Might find it interesting.

Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers

#143

Post by cassianoleal »

leoedin wrote: post #105

The problem is mainly one of discoverability. The non-programmer in the examples says "simple" when they mean "discoverable". The programmer says "simple" when they mean "not much code complexity". Of course you disagree. All the examples - installing and using a package manager, running a command line program - are "simple" from a software point of view, but they're not at all "discoverable". To understand the steps…

> I'm frequently stumped by man pages, and end up having to hunt down an example of how to use a particular command line application on Stack Overflow.

If you're not aware of tldr [0], I highly recommend it.

[0] https://tldr.sh/

Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers

#144

Post by dbalatero »

MrPatan wrote: post #102
crdrost wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I want to emphasize those aspects. • Excel is based on a simpler model of computation, something like the unification ideas in logic programming, state is not named and minimally expressive, etc. You want a looping construct? Better autofill a column or something! • Excel automatically includes printf-style debugging of every object in the system; that is the default state of the system and you have to hide col…

Ima stop you right there and ask how you made the bullet points. • Is it just a pasted character? * Is it a markdown thing? * Is it?

You can tell it's a character because the wrapped lines don't indent & align like a real bullet list.

Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers

#145

Post by IshKebab »

bmitc wrote: post #30
gregjor wrote: post #27

Not really a novel observation, nor surprising. The secret world of auto mechanics: “Just change the air filter.” The secret world of electricians: “Turn the circuit breaker off and back on.” The secret worlds of chefs, carpenters, doctors, lawyers, … I could go on and on. Why would programmers expect people not invested in programming to know this stuff, or care? I only care about ignorance of jargon and specific sk…

The more apt analogies would be: * "chng af" * "tglCB" I will continue my crusade to fight against this and spell things out until my death.

Hear hear. I don't think programmers - as a group - get to complain about people not learning programming tools while simultaneously making them so unapproachable (especially Linux things).

It's not just the overuse of acronyms. There's also:

* Religious devotion to the CLI despite it having terrible discoverability.

* Really bad naming. Git is probably the worst offender at this, but the whole of Unix is a naming mess. WTF is `usr`? Is that where user files go?

* Generally over-complicated tooling. A good example of this is Node/NPM. So complicated to set up! Contrast it with https://trunkrs.dev/

* Deification of distro packages. No I do not want to spend half of my development time packaging my app for 10 different distros. I guess I'll go with curl | bash then.

* Distain for binary app distribution. I'm looking at you glibc.

Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers

#146

Post by tasuki »

nindalf wrote: post #78

Literally 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…

Also don't confuse "easy" and "simple". "Easy" is subjective and related to familiarity, while "simple" is a more objective concept. Eg. Markdown is objectively simpler than MS Word.

Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers

#147

Post by ZephyrBlu »

nicolas_t wrote: post #92
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Umm, most professional programmers probably don't know how to operate in a linux dev environment bro... That is also an extremely stupid requirement. You can be a good programmer (Especially as a junior) without knowing all the linux command line tools.

I haven't met a good professional programmer working in webdev who didn't know their way around linux. I've met plenty of bad programers who got into this field for money, didn't know how their way around unix, were barely able to do fizz buzz and would be better doing something else. I haven't hired them though. Not knowing one's way around linux is a sign of lack of curiosity and passion for the topic. It's obvious…

> Not knowing one's way around linux is a sign of lack of curiosity and passion for the topic

Complete bullshit. The only thing it's a sign of is that you're not curious or passionate about linux.

Knowing about and being interested in linux may be a positive signal, but the opposite is not a negative signal.

Knowing linux is not a requirement to be a good professional programmer working in webdev.

Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers

#148

Post by ryanjshaw »

crdrost wrote: post #90
mlatu wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Excel is powerful, but it’s not easy to learn. It only seems that way to people who already know how it works. this right there. except, it IS easy to learn actually. it's visual, you can click around and find out. if you forget the spelling of some formula, no probs, there is a help button. the interface is what makes it easier, markdown is also an interface. except it's not AS exposed to the user as excel is. peo…

Yeah, I want to emphasize those aspects. • Excel is based on a simpler model of computation, something like the unification ideas in logic programming, state is not named and minimally expressive, etc. You want a looping construct? Better autofill a column or something! • Excel automatically includes printf-style debugging of every object in the system; that is the default state of the system and you have to hide col…

One additional point: since Excel packages the code with the data, when somebody sends me a spreadsheet with functionality I've never seen before it's extremely easy to figure out what they did and learn on the job. This is also why Jupyter notebooks are so powerful.

If instead of Excel they run a bunch of scripts and just send me the output, I am left much less empowered.

Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers

#149

Post by astura »

fcatalan wrote: post #13

I 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…

Are you confusing bootcamp and college? Or are you hiring people with only English degrees instead of CS degrees?

Sure, I graduated from college almost two decades ago but all those "can't"s were very much part of the standard CS curriculum then. You needed those skills to pass CS 101.

The new grads I work with now at are fine on the terminal. They only complain that they didn't learn how to use more "advanced" features of debuggers and IDEs in college. Exactly the opposite.

Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers

#150

Post by beeforpork »

Once 'bash' is replaced by 'aish' and its avatar 'SAIri', users will be able to do the tasks that are not immediately clickable in the next menu, by just asking SAIri. At that point, your non-programmer friends won't be asking you stupid questions anymore! :-)

Unless 'aish' has crashed.

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