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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

#151

Post by Dalewyn »

pas wrote: post #138
Dalewyn wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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.

The dissonance stems from the fact that most people don't care about power using.

Users (most people) don't care for messing with their computers because that's not what they're at the computer for. They want to do something on the computer, and the only thing they care about is whether they can get it done.

It's like how most people drive cars to get from Point A to Point B, without giving a damn how a car works or how they could tune the car. If it gets them to Point B then nothing else matters, and tuning their car is a roadblock to getting to Point B because they aren't getting any closer to Point B while tuning their car.

Power users use computers as the end to a means, users on the other hand use computers as a means to an end. More dials and knobs on their computer is irrelevant and even prohibitive for users. Most of us here are all power users and it's natural to want more people to be like us, but the reality is we are not the majority of people on the planet.

As an aside, most of us also gloss over how computers work without a care even as we preach about how the commons must understand the complexities. I doubt most tech bros and neckbeards would understand electrical engineering even as they preach how everyone must understand bash and Powershell.

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

#153

Post by neilalexander »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #147
nicolas_t wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly this. I feel like a lot of operating system enthusiasts forget that the operating system is, to many people, merely another tool to enable them to do something else. You can absolutely be enthusiastic about achieving an end result and not give a damn about the tools that got you there.

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

#154

Post by DeathArrow »

The author argues that markdown is the best way to write text. I know many people who argue that LateX is the best way to write text, and they also have arguments.

As a programmer I sometime prefer the world of clickety-click GUI instead that of command line. Doing something in a visual way, requires no knowledge. You just discover how to do things as you do them. Using the command line requires me to learn paths, steps, command line arguments, the order of the command line arguments and also memorize them.

Some times I prefer the command line.

I know that for some folks VI or Emacs is better and more productive and faster, but for me Visual Studio is that and more.

Maybe there isn't one objective truth, and for some persons the command line and text editors is better and for other folks the visual stuff is better.

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

#155

Post by neilalexander »

pooper wrote: post #77
deafpolygon wrote: post #62

My children are a fine example - they're teenagers now, and they have had more access to tech than most people (thanks to Dad [me!]). Yet they barely know how to do more than Word, and don't understand the concept of a text editor vs rich text editor vs word processor. The problem isn't them, it's us. Why DO we expect "normies", as it were, to understand Markdown, text editors and the holy war of Plain Text? Why are…

My motivation for using markdown is simple: I can keep track of changes with git.

Which raises an interesting question: are you concerned with keeping track of changes or are you concerned with keeping track of changes _with git_?

In my opinion this is where a lot of technical folk diverge from everyone else. Technical folk tend to become infatuated with their specific tools whereas most other people would be happy just to find their expectations met, and neither side really wants to understand or compromise with the other.

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

#156

Post by DeathArrow »

>"Oh, you're a programmer, Can't you do $THING"

I've been asked by others to install software, repair PCs, repair laptops and even modify or replace firmware on phones. Sometimes I did it, if I had time. But for my personal needs, I always called a technician or went to a repair center.

As for programming tasks, I did many: C++ desktop software, Windows device drivers in C, embedded software, websites in HTML + JS, video games, mobile apps, hacked Android kernel modules and libraries, web backend, web frontend, microservices.

If you have the time to learn the business domain, learn tools, frameworks, libraries, APIs - you can work on anything. "Doing" things is different, because some projects are quite huge, impossible for one person during his life time.

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

#157

Post by azangru »

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…

> just pick up Excel

Pandas are free; Excel is not.

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

#158

Post by PeterisP »

sideshowb wrote: post #84
ncpa-cpl wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> newer graduates may have studied programming because "it pays well", Define new. Programming has been known to pay well since at least the 1990s.

There's a big gap between making early career choices and them materializing, also, information dissemination is slow and uneven.

> Programming has been known to pay well since at least the 1990s.

Known by whom? The median family in 1990 wouldn't even consider that programming as a career exists, much less that it pays well. At the dot-com boom in late 1990s, the adults would know that, but it wouldn't yet be "culturally assimilated" for the masses in the way the assumption about doctors and lawyers income was; and then you get the dot-com bust. I'd say that the time when the median high-schooler get told by all reasonable adults that "programming is a sure way to money for anyone, not just for weird geeks" doesn't arrive until 2000+ or even later; and from that time it takes ~10 years for that generation of kids to pass through school, college and fill the companies in great numbers.

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

#159

Post by jamesgill »

Isn’t this applicable to pretty much all domains of knowledge? ‘Just change the oil yourself, it’s easy’, says the auto mechanic. ‘Just add the circuit yourself, it’s easy’, says the home electrician. There’s a term for this, but I can’t recall it.

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

#160

Post by Kye »

nindalf wrote: post #110
mejutoco wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not contradicting you. Just adding this famous case of using Excel. > the median Excel user probably completes this task quicker and better than the median pandas user Some might complete it with catastrophic effects. > A million-row limit on Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet software may have led to Public Health England misplacing nearly 16,000 Covid test [1] [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54423988

Yeah, that's the flip side of a simple tool that makes it easy to solve problems. It's not clear when "simple" stops working or how to recover from it. On the other hand, the bespoke software approach can have bugs too.

There are a lot of times where a low-level understanding of Computer Stuff lets me easily get problems in simple stuff. Like if I see a year that's 1969 or a number that's in the negatives and around 4 million, I know some kind of overflow happened and can work from there to diagnose the problem. I don't know the right balance, though. I know all this stuff because you just had to if you wanted to do anything with a computer beyond simple office tasks.

Even advanced stuff has nice interfaces these days. My new laptop with a dGPU comes with software that has an overclock toggle and some guidance on how to get the most out of it, warnings, etc. That's a long way from editing files to make HIMEM.SYS work so Wing Commander would run.

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