Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers

And yet, in the world of GUIs, discoverability is getting increasingly rare. I don't think it's prioritized at all anymore.

This is the one for me. Yes, yes I could.

If I spent a year learning how to do $THING.

So after that exchange, I'm either stupid, or more likely "Well, if you didn't want to help, you could have just said so".

We were talking about a recent problem he was having, getting his IDE and build server and virtual environments talking to each other, and it became immediately clear to me that if he knew what an environment variable was, he’d have solved this in about 5 minutes. Instead he’d been stuck for days, kind of just flailing.

I also suggested spinning up a dev VM or container so that he can make snapshots, nuke it and start over, etc as he makes progress figuring it out. He flatly stated that that “wouldn’t work” for reasons he couldn’t articulate.

I am almost obsessively curious about how computers work, and that curiosity led me to Linux and a nearly 100%-CLI workflow. That more than any other skill has paid off, even if viewed completely dispassionately: at least half the tools you’ll be using will have been written from this same POV, where a CLI-centric workflow and Linux are both first-class citizens.

A lot of people just want to “write code” but seem to completely ignore the reality that that doesn’t happen in a vacuum. You’re using tools, and those tools very often require some understanding of the computer they’re running on.

There’s some meme floating around out there about how “easy is hard” —- exercising is hard, but enduring the effects of not exercising is harder, etc. Now that I’m on the other side of it, I absolutely believe that working in the command line, ideally on Linux (but macOS will do fine as well), is the best way to pick up all the “glue” knowledge that allows you to reason your way through just about any situation you find yourself in. We do ourselves quite a disservice by calling most of these skills those of “sysadmin” or “devops” or what have you —- to me it just seems like it’s “knowing computers,” and when you’re spending your days writing instructions for computers to perform, that can surely only be a good thing.

Most people receive the training where opening up Word is not difficult, and then once they've done that, there's no step up. They press "a", an "a" appears on the screen. They have buttons that do things like italicize. The first few steps are easy.

It may be the case that after that there is a brick wall in the difficulty curve, whereas the programmer-favored solution is a smooth easy curve for quite a ways. But that first step is sufficient to block most people, and people are often happy to just give up in the face of the brick wall.

This is not unique to programmers. A lot of the "maker" disciplines have a similar step curve. A lot of times it's just that first step that is the hardest overall. But it's enough.