251–260 of 334 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What kind of college grads don't know how to operate in a linux dev environment? That'd be an immediate no-hire from me.
Most lol. You only hiring MIT and Stanford grads?
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…
Windows does that, and its regular users barely visit Control Panel, not to mention .msc-s and other system menus, e.g. Security or Sharing tab. When something breaks or they have an idea that isn’t in a nearby menu, they call a nearby programmer for help. Your sentiment is agreeable, but we are still unable make interfaces you want. There probably even is a button or a sequence of ui actions in your system for half…
No they don't. Normal people don't have programmers on call. They google the error message and do whatever the classiest-looking page they find tells them to do, which usually starts with opening the Control Panel. Honestly, the same thing that programmers do when they hit something they don't understand, except programmers are better evaluators of classiness irt help pages (due to the mental model.).
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…
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.
You must have encountered only very simple spreadsheets. I've had to reverse engineer a number of technical spreadsheets that took days of full time sweated effort to merely understand the principles and more days again to extract the methods accurately enough so that they could be reimplemented in a programming language.
We as an industry really need to be a whole lot more intolerant of ignorance. People learned how to drive, they can learn how to use a computer.
they learned to drive, not how a car works all the way down to the thermodynamics of the engine. they learn to send WhatsApp messages with their iPhone, don't see why they'd learn how computers work all the way down to Maxwell's equations.
Much of the scenarios this dude mentions are table-stakes in the grand scheme of computing things.
Instead we have an endless supply of wanterpreneurs re-engineering everything to make computing as mindless as possible because everyone knows the stupider it is, the bigger your potential audience is. And since everyone wants megagrowth bullshit we have to make using a computer as dumb and mindless as possible! Fuck all the people who take the time to understand this stuff, who got these companies to where they are today, they are the long tail...
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…
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
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
GNU ls's manpage has no examples, but it's also a thousand words long so it hardly seems fair to characterize it as bare-bones. All in all, I find that manpages on Linux are usually pretty good, particularly compared to systems like MacOS where many daemons and utilities seem to have no manpage at all. People are far too quick to slag manpages, which probably has something to do with the `man` utility itself being a…
POSIX ls's manpage has examples. Well, one example, of `-laRF`. But also I can't imagine what good more examples will do anyway. `-lahR` cover the vast majority of common uses.
For me, 99% of the time I use -ltrh and -ltrha. But instead of -R, I use other utilities like fzf, find, or tree. Tree is really nice for a quick overview of directory structures.
The problem is most people do not try to put any effort into understanding what they are doing by the computer. When you ask your wife to fetch you from work at 5 you don't have to explain: * That she needs to take a car, * That there must be enough fuel in it, * That she has to plan some time for the drive and add extra if traffic is expected on the way, * That she needs to let you know if there are unforeseen circu…
Whereas "the car won't start" is equivalent to "the printer isn't working."
Many people know how to diagnose and resolve simple car issues, like a dead battery, just as many people know how to fix a printer that isn't working.
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…
Oh and "memorise a seemingly meaningless sequence of text" makes no sense as all sequences of text are meaningless until we assign them meaning which is what you're doing learning a CLI.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not only that, it often lies, and does it in a "convincing" way.
So it's doing a pretty good job of imitating those "experts" then too