I think the author lacks a lot maturity in collaboration. If you are collaborating, you have to put your preferences aside and use the tool that works for the majority. If that tool is MS Word, you just swallow your nerd pride, and use Word.
Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers
191–200 of 334 posts
Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers
#192After a decade of this, i convinced my mother in law to buy a MacBook and genius bar support. No, i won't fix your printer. Sorry that i figure this out quickly. LMGTFY got me in a lot of trouble with my family...
Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers
#193As an intensely tech guy I completely despise the tendency that some engineers have to speak in ambigu-ese and tech-ese making less reacheable what the fr*eak they are talking about and establish themselves as "essential experts" when they could easily speak in normal-ese with minimal effort making concepts reachable for colleagues.
BTW this can happen to any field, not just tech. It can happen with intellectuals, philosophers, medical doctors, blockchain lingo, AI lingo, devops lingo, telecom lingo....
Fortunately! Now we have AI which is insanely good at summarizing and explanning anything like I'm 6y/o so that little expert trick just got massively nuked and has its days counted.
Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers
#194For normal people (non-programmers) computers are pretty terrible. I'm kind of curious what happens when everyone gets a Jarvis-like assistant that can do the scary stuff (open a terminal, type some commands, or possibly code up a nice UI in seconds) based on natural language requests.
> For normal people (non-programmers) computers are pretty terrible. I don’t know — they pull a supercomputer out of their pocket and use it dozens of times a day.
That's only because the supercomputer was designed around making it as good for the 'normal' person as possible. Sure it can do so so much more...but the user does not need to know a damn thing about how it works under the hood to use it. Even just making a note with an iPhone requires nearly every last stack of technology invented by man so that the user pressed 'notes' and taps letters on the screen. Custom silicon, 5G & server farms (for cloud backup to prevent knowing about physical storage), 1600nit OLED displays, advanced battery tech...all of it..for those letters to be there when you come back. Knowing a billion little things about computers to use them was always the key problem just like how you are not expected to wire up your lights and configure a circuit box every night in your home.
Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers
#195The 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…
Reminds me of Rich Hickey's classic talk "Simple made Easy": https://paulrcook.com/blog/simple-made-easy
Simple and easy are not the same thing.
Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers
#196The 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…
Affairs will begin to favor the "programmer" definition of simple with the advancement of conversational models. A chat bot that responds to your prompt with command line flags is going to appear simpler than an answer about advanced physics or math.
Something can be easy while not being simple.
Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers
#197This used to bother me before, but then I realized, "this is why I get paid the big bucks". Now, I see my "unreasonable" requests as a sign of how much I've progressed in my field, even relative to some of my peers, who can't do basic devops.
It's easy to forget how many countless hours I spent learning how to Google for the right command line args and picking up little tricks here and there to chips at problems until I've solved them. Take a deep breath and give everyone else who can barely use their keyboard and mouse to do their work a break alright. Not everyone enjoys bashing their head against the wall to solve these things the "easy" way.
Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers
#198Earlier 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…
That pt 3 is actually something I really like in Office. It isn't just instant, you can see changes live as you mouse over different options. I also really like the search tool that lets you just type what feature you are looking for. I have no idea where the 'new pivot table' button is and I don't care, I can just search it instead of hunting through menus.
as much as i hate microsoft, excel endearingly excels expectations...
Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers
#199I frequently think to myself, every programmer should be forced to suffer as a user. The weird, risk averse behaviors of users will begin to seem reasonable when confronted with the actual experience of using computers.
"Simple" means "uses abstractions that I've learned by trial and error but can't explain."
Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers
#200As an intensely tech guy I completely despise the tendency that some engineers have to speak in ambigu-ese and tech-ese making less reacheable what the fr*eak they are talking about and establish themselves as "essential experts" when they could easily speak in normal-ese with minimal effort making concepts reachable for colleagues. BTW this can happen to any field, not just tech. It can happen with intellectuals, ph…
The AI also regularly misuses terms and gets things wrong