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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

#201

Post by efields »

Dalewyn wrote: post #97
AndrewPGameDev wrote: post #79

Slight 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…

I'm a SWE by trade, but I'm trying to start a business with my spouse that is, traditionally, 100% not dependent on computers. Every time my brain starts to go toward the path of _lets improve this process with technology_, I do a little research, fiddle with code, and find that the solution I think I want would be a few days work minimum. But none of that work actually addresses the IRL work that needs to get done in the meantime. The opportunity cost of introducing technology, even coming from a technologist with a quick-learning partner, is still too high.

Instead, we get the job done with a whiteboard, lists (digital and paper), shared calendars, and a couple Google Docs / Spreadsheets. Post-its, markers, blank labels… office supplies! Incredible technology of the 20th century! Try it!

I was initially frustrated, like this author and other posters, that there's so much intermediary technology to learn to get anything done with. OMG — even getting a point of sale app going on our Very Capable Pocket Computers in 2023 BCE requires Xcode and staring blankly at docs on Stripe that appear flagrantly wrong.

I've seen this pattern at organizations too, where the thing that will clearly fix our problem is actually many tens of thousands of dollars and requires dedicated resources to use, and just slogging through the problem and being scrappy is ultimately _most_ efficient for the company.

The good news is technology really has made a lot of humanity more productive, and the average adult uses quite a lot of it to get their everyday job done. But there's only so much time and resources. Technology we're already super familiar with gets a lot of the job done already. Making portable and sharable lists, communicating about dates and times, traveling many miles or zero miles to see someone's face — that is advanced civilization shit, and we do it all the time already.

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

#202

Post by packetlost »

tuatoru wrote: post #179
cassianoleal wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/

man(1) pages on linux are almost all terrible. Unworthy of inclusion in any manual. Proper manuals have examples of use. Many linux man pages don't even discuss (or list, even!) return codes or failure modes.

Yeah, I really don't understand the aversion to examples. The sorta-standard format for man pages is... extremely confusing, even after a decade of using them.

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

#204

Post by 908B64B197 »

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…

> 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

Sounds like you are hiring wrong. The point of a good engineering degree is to teach someone how to learn. Any degree worth something will include non-trivial coursework and projects, so they should already be familiar with some of the tooling.

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

#205

Post by 908B64B197 »

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…

> 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 you need to memorise a seemingly meaningless sequence of text.

In a big enough organization, document sharing setup and program installation for non-technical users should be performed by sysadmins. There's a good chance if someone needs something, everyone will need it, so with proper device management tools they can make it discoverable/preconfigured for everyone.

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

#206

Post by Aeolun »

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…

> Excel is powerful, but it’s not easy to learn.

This may be true in a general sense, but probably not when you talk about the programmer picking up Excel. I often find I can use it for more things than people that spend their whole lives in excel simply because I have a reasonable mental model of what it should be able to do.

That said, I want to talk to whoever made the abomination that is VLOOKUP and ask them why.

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

#207

Post by sideshowb »

PeterisP wrote: post #158
sideshowb wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 "cultu…

This is a good point, programming was known to pay well, but you're right it was seen as for nerds only in the 90s. My parents were even a little worried about me taking compsci because they thought I wasn't nerdy enough to compete! Glad I didn't listen.

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

#208

Post by sideshowb »

UncleEntity wrote: post #173
sideshowb wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I went to college for a big chunk of the 90s, liked to fiddle with computers and didn’t know programming paid well. In fact I didn’t know much at all about computer science other than some prerequisite class I was bored out of my mind in.

That's because you were obviously interested in programming, not money (yay).

Gates was, however, on the Forbes rich list since the late 80s, and richest person in the world from 1995, so I find it hard to believe anybody really money-driven wouldn't have known this at the time.

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

#209

Post by Aeolun »

watwut wrote: post #132
Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But then all the nuances take 2 more years to realize.

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

#210

Post by masfuerte »

tuatoru wrote: post #179
cassianoleal wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/

man(1) pages on linux are almost all terrible. Unworthy of inclusion in any manual. Proper manuals have examples of use. Many linux man pages don't even discuss (or list, even!) return codes or failure modes.

Gnu stuff tends to be properly documented in info, not man. But yeah, loads of stuff just isn't well documented.
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