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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

#311

Post by KronisLV »

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…

> Literally everything I write is in Markdown because it’s so simple to me.

I'm inclined to agree, for the display of some text, it's one of the better choices that I've encountered!

I actually recall working on a system where HTML instead of Markdown was chosen for the storage and display of user messages (think along the lines of a chat/e-mail app), which came with a plethora of complexity and problems - everything from various editors across apps formatting things differently (sometimes breaking WYSIWYG), to the formatting in the database becoming inconsistent as the apps and libraries are updated but old messages weren't affected, any sort of manual parsing and migrating this data being difficult, as well as sanitization concerns and security challenges.

The Markdown suggestion of mine was shot down, but as far as I know there was just problem after problem with using HTML before I took a break from that org and took a bit of a sabbatical. Then again, migrating between different formats like Markdown and HTML is needlessly complicated if you have pre-existing data, so it's better to make the "correct" choice on day 1.

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

#312

Post by Kye »

recursive wrote: post #246
Kye wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Overflow to negative 4 million? I guess that would be signed 23-bit integers? I've never seen this in my life.

Typo. I meant billion. It's also been a long time since I actually needed to know this, so I'm not 100% sure it's ~4 billion.

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

#313

Post by biggedyb »

brightlancer wrote: post #289
pessimizer wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When something breaks or they have an idea that isn’t in a nearby menu, they call a nearby programmer for help. 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,…

For a loose definition of "programmers", sure they do. Maybe it's a sysadmin, maybe it's a teen who writes/ builds game mods, but IME most normal folks have someone at work or someone in their family they can ask/ harass, and they'll do this before they'll start typing error messages into a web search. Folks will come and ask for help but then you have to tease out of them what the problem was. The entire idea of "I…

> I worked with a developer who would send screenshots of a text error rather than just copy and paste it..

I've worked with one like that. I got fed up so I just took to walking back to my desk and telling them to google it to see what the general consensus is, when they can tell me more about it I'll come back. Did that enough times till they got 'used' to not being lazy and at least tried to understand the issue before yelling for help.

Was harsh at the time but they knew they were being lazy and as devs we are paid to find solutions. I think that's the critical thing in this, we're not only incentivised into naturally and habitually finding solutions to things, but also we are failing when we don't. We're failing for our expectation of our own analytical capability. Also we work with devs, or dev-like people so we get used to talking to people who will either keep up with us when we're rattling down a rabbit hole of thinking, but sometimes will gleefully join us in it to try to find the solutions.

I think that's the crucial thing here. We're applying our expectations of ourselves/peers into personality traits that find solution finding completely alien, who not only don't think 'this is for me to understand', don't even approach the thought that they can potentially do something to fix it, even at a very small level.

The things we do everyday as easily as breathing, to a lot of people is magic, and that's really not a good thing (“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”).

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

#314

Post by biggedyb »

throwing_away wrote: post #306
andrewf wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"man man" explains the section numbers.

Maybe we need a fork of `man` that reads the page in a sexy tts voice while showing minecraft footage on half the screen.

Or AI generated animated walkthrough content straight into PluralSight...

...and I write this partly in jest as I absolutely would use that.

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

#315

Post by biggedyb »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #283
CWuestefeld wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always used Android phones, but my company recently stopped supporting them and told me they have to issue me a new phone - this time an iPhone. And I'm utterly lost. At one time, Apple was said to be the high priests of user experience, with intuitive interactions that would just work the way you expect. This seems to have fallen by the wayside, pushed out by making it more sophisticated I suppose. Because thin…

Double tap the home button and it brings up the app selection screen. Took me an embarrassingly long time to figure that out some years back.

What.. it doesn't really, does it? I'm going to try that now.

oh wow that's awesome. consider my hat truly doffed

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

#316

Post by reboog711 »

brightlancer wrote: post #289
pessimizer wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When something breaks or they have an idea that isn’t in a nearby menu, they call a nearby programmer for help. 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,…

For a loose definition of "programmers", sure they do. Maybe it's a sysadmin, maybe it's a teen who writes/ builds game mods, but IME most normal folks have someone at work or someone in their family they can ask/ harass, and they'll do this before they'll start typing error messages into a web search. Folks will come and ask for help but then you have to tease out of them what the problem was. The entire idea of "I…

> I worked with a developer who would send screenshots of a text error rather than just copy and paste it

I worked with someone who did this too. Would also commonly send screenshots of code we were discussing.

"Dude, I need to see this code in context, can't yous end me a link to the file / line in Github?"

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

#317

Post by pas »

brightlancer wrote: post #300
Dalewyn wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

I don't think we're talking about tuning or power users -- this is the equivalent of folks who don't know how to check their engine oil or their tire pressure. Someone doesn't care how their car works _until their car doesn't work_. Or they want to change something relatively minor: "Hey I just bought these awesome tires. Please put them on the car." "Well, those are too big for your rims so you'd need new rims. And…

Oh, that's a nice car analogy! (It'd be a shame if something were to happen to it :D)

... but on a bit more serious note, yes, this is an absolute hard question of how to provide "informed user experience". We all know that using phones, GPS, 4G networks, wikipedia, google translate, NFC payment, etc. makes us rely on them. We don't prepare for long trips, we don't even buy maps, nowadays I even forget to download the offline map.

All models are wrong, some are very useful. Picking the model that >> computers are mysterious and some apps "just work" and anything that doesn't work is "fuck that shit" And ... sometimes people put their cat in the microwave, and open every and all malware, and ...

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

#318

Post by reboog711 »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #277
JohnFen wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've always used Android phones, but my company recently stopped supporting them and told me they have to issue me a new phone - this time an iPhone. And I'm utterly lost. At one time, Apple was said to be the high priests of user experience, with intuitive interactions that would just work the way you expect. This seems to have fallen by the wayside, pushed out by making it more sophisticated I suppose. Because thin…

> Apple was said to be the high priests of user experience

People say that, I always wonder how much of that was true. It took me three days to figure out how to get my iPad Touch to stop repeating a single song. I don't know how a single song got selected on repeat.

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

#319

Post by mlatu »

feoren wrote: post #270
kwhitefoot wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when somebody sends me a spreadsheet with functionality I've never seen before it's extremely easy to figure out what they did a 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 reimpl…

Think about how much harder it would be if you couldn't see the inputs, code, and outputs all together at once. The difficulty you found has little to do with Excel; you were trying to learn a whole new domain by reverse-engineering a model created by an SME. Of course it took multiple days of effort to merely (!?) "understand the principles" of a brand new technical domain. Ideally the SME should be explaining those…

> The difficulty you found has little to do with Excel;

i claim, if you allowed access to an underlying source code representation of the spreadsheet, or rather, if you made that transformation at all, you could easily add symbols and labels to transform an excel sheet into something a programmer could turn into a binary but i doubt that step inbetween is desired

I mean, the activity of analyzing an excel spreadsheet is more akin to learning where all the items in your favourite point and click adventure is and in what order to get them where, than to actually analyzing a problem

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

#320

Post by buildsjets »

cushychicken wrote: post #286
buildsjets wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey thanks, this is great. I have a simple py script I am trying to deploy to small team that does some web scraping and slicing/dicing of data from internal repositories. I had been starting to learn PyQT but it was really overkill for what I needed to do, which was a simple menu of options and input/output file selection. A lot of HN devs don't realize this truth about working in industries that have not historical…

Can't recommend PysimpleGUI highly enough for this use case. Hope it suits your needs!

Worked perfect, I had it doing something on-screen in 15 minutes, had it mostly mocked up in 30, and had it polished and pretty with error handling in an hour. Will make for a good demo on Monday.
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