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After being downvoted, I'm trying to understand what could have hurt someone sensibility. Maybe the word _writer_ feels far from the shiny tech scene, but in th
by vanni 9y ago
After being downvoted, I'm trying to understand what could have hurt someone sensibility. Maybe the word _writer_ feels far from the shiny tech scene, but in the end we ARE writers, and of the highest qualities. Kids understand what a writer does, your parents too. So I think that it is a good approach to explaining what a computer programmer does, in the end.
- themoat 9y agoYour explanation makes sense to me. My son is 5 and loves Lego. I just tried explaining that someone had to write the instructions in the book, that my son has to follow to build the final piece. The programmer is the instruction writer, the computer is the lego builder. Like any analogy, it isn't perfect, but for a 5 year old, that was enough to satisfy him for now.
- timerol 9y agoA guideline to keep in mind (from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html): "Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized." Also: "Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading." Though I'm personally fine with legitimate questions about expected behavior.
- vanni 9y agoCode is speech in the US: This court can find no meaningful difference between computer language, particularly high-level languages as defined above, and German or French... Like music and mathematical equations, computer language is just that, language, and it communicates information either to a computer or to those who can read it. - Judge Patel, April 15, 1996 Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-established-code-speech https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-estab...