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Fascinating. We programmers live by our eyes, and I've had a few frightening flights of fancy about losing my sight, and what employment would be like in this f

Fascinating. We programmers live by our eyes, and I've had a few frightening flights of fancy about losing my sight, and what employment would be like in this field. I still wonder though how you'd go about reading other people's (bad) code, since there isn't any prior memory about what it was _supposed_ to do, and how you perform major refactors that just appear so "visual" to my way of thinking, e.g. hollowing out a function body into two smaller functions and adding a tail call.

stevetrewick 11y ago
>e.g. hollowing out a function body into two smaller functions and adding a tail call. Actually theres's a direct analogy there. The reason you do that is to make it easier to comprehend. It looks messy. To much info. Now imagine you have to listen to your screen reader speaking all of it. Same deal. To much, time to refactor to something more navigable.
Nishioka 11y ago
I'd like to believe, given that the largest part of the brain is devoted to visual processing, that it gets freed up for memory\creativity etc. Given the right kind of guidance and development people with "disabilities" could bring a very unique perspective and new ways of thinking to problems and algorithms. Deaf people for example think visually from birth as they have never heard sound. And we still don't even have a good way of representing sign language on paper or digitally.
- parham90 11y ago
  This is really one of the points that always amazes me. We have all this potential, right here on earth. Why are we looking for aliens? Why aren't we spending more time in knowing how people with different senses missing understand a particular concept? This occurred to me while I was struggling with linear regression and its use in machine learning.
x404 11y ago
Yes, I also have the fear of losing my sight when I'm getting older. I hope I could code even I'm 70 or 80 years old. It's not just for make living, also for dignity.
parham90 11y ago
Actually, a lot of things you may perceive as visual are not visual, at least if you imagine "visual" as something I (a blind person) cannot understand. I do a lot of refactoring, maybe even more than you do, simply because I can't understand functions that have two indentation levels (like two if statements inside each other), or functions that go above 15 lines. I'm saying that I may do it more than you because, unlike sighted people, we can't glance at 6 lines at once; we have to look at the code one line at a time. So, the smaller each section (whether it's an if statement, a loop, or a function, depending on the language itself), the better for me.
- scrupulusalbion 11y ago
  > depending on the language itself Are there any languages or language families that you find easier to use? (inb4 COBOL is the easiest)

stevetrewick 11y ago

>e.g. hollowing out a function body into two smaller functions and adding a tail call. Actually theres's a direct analogy there. The reason you do that is to make it easier to comprehend. It looks messy. To much info. Now imagine you have to listen to your screen reader speaking all of it. Same deal. To much, time to refactor to something more navigable.

Nishioka 11y ago

I'd like to believe, given that the largest part of the brain is devoted to visual processing, that it gets freed up for memory\creativity etc. Given the right kind of guidance and development people with "disabilities" could bring a very unique perspective and new ways of thinking to problems and algorithms. Deaf people for example think visually from birth as they have never heard sound. And we still don't even have a good way of representing sign language on paper or digitally.

parham90 11y ago
This is really one of the points that always amazes me. We have all this potential, right here on earth. Why are we looking for aliens? Why aren't we spending more time in knowing how people with different senses missing understand a particular concept? This occurred to me while I was struggling with linear regression and its use in machine learning.

x404 11y ago

Yes, I also have the fear of losing my sight when I'm getting older. I hope I could code even I'm 70 or 80 years old. It's not just for make living, also for dignity.

parham90 11y ago

Actually, a lot of things you may perceive as visual are not visual, at least if you imagine "visual" as something I (a blind person) cannot understand. I do a lot of refactoring, maybe even more than you do, simply because I can't understand functions that have two indentation levels (like two if statements inside each other), or functions that go above 15 lines. I'm saying that I may do it more than you because, unlike sighted people, we can't glance at 6 lines at once; we have to look at the code one line at a time. So, the smaller each section (whether it's an if statement, a loop, or a function, depending on the language itself), the better for me.

scrupulusalbion 11y ago
> depending on the language itself Are there any languages or language families that you find easier to use? (inb4 COBOL is the easiest)