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Not really a novel observation, nor surprising. The secret world of auto mechanics: “Just change the air filter.” The secret world of electricians: “Turn the

Not really a novel observation, nor surprising. The secret world of auto mechanics: “Just change the air filter.” The secret world of electricians: “Turn the circuit breaker off and back on.” The secret worlds of chefs, carpenters, doctors, lawyers, … I could go on and on. Why would programmers expect people not invested in programming to know this stuff, or care? I only care about ignorance of jargon and specific skills when demonstrated by so-called professionals. A “programmer” who can’t install from the command line seems like an auto mechanic who can’t open the hood.

bmitc 4y ago
The more apt analogies would be: * "chng af" * "tglCB" I will continue my crusade to fight against this and spell things out until my death.
- gregjor 4y ago
  Learning some jargon and specialized skills most people don’t need or care about doesn’t make a person smarter or better, nor does it mean everyone else is ignorant or too dumb. Showing off and complaining about the dumb masses is vanity, not professionalism.
  - bmitc 4y ago
    I was just using your examples to comment on the common programmer practice of needlessly shortening words and names of things or, even worse, intentionally quirkily naming something to make a specialized word or domain even more specialized. It's a practice that I do not like, as it arbitrarily creates an additional layer of obfuscation.
    - gregjor 4y ago
      At one time memory constraints made the short names necessary. Not a technical issue anymore. Now we have autocomplete in the shell. But what do you expect from a professional caste who debate endlessly about efficiency and “productivity” supposedly improved a fraction by a keyboard or typeface or color scheme?
      - Espressosaurus 4y ago
        Let me post another article about how I can save 10 seconds by using Emacs for my toaster!
- IshKebab 4y ago
  Hear hear. I don't think programmers - as a group - get to complain about people not learning programming tools while simultaneously making them so unapproachable (especially Linux things). It's not just the overuse of acronyms. There's also: * Religious devotion to the CLI despite it having terrible discoverability. * Really bad naming. Git is probably the worst offender at this, but the whole of Unix is a naming mess. WTF is `usr`? Is that where user files go? * Generally over-complicated tooling. A good example of this is Node/NPM. So complicated to set up! Contrast it with https://trunkrs.dev/ https://trunkrs.dev/ * Deification of distro packages. No I do not want to spend half of my development time packaging my app for 10 different distros. I guess I'll go with curl | bash then. * Distain for binary app distribution. I'm looking at you glibc.
  - bmitc 4y ago
    Thanks for being one of the rarities top understand. Gives me a glimmer of hope. I agree with everything you said.
strken 4y ago
I think the interesting bit isn't the jargon, it's the parallel but separate paths of computer use. Changing an car's air filter is obviously different from driving. Flipping a circuit breaker is like flipping a switch, just for the whole house, and also it happens automatically if you anger the switch by plugging too much stuff in or dropping the toaster in the sink. Both of them make sense intuitively. Changing a .md file seems like it should be the same thing as changing a .docx or .odt file, since they're all different kinds of formatted text, but for some reason you need an entirely different toolchain. My resume needs to be compiled using wkhtmltopdf, pandoc, and make. It's deployed using Dokku, which wraps Docker, and the Heroku static site buildpack, which wraps nginx. It's kind of weird that a non-programmer doing the same thing would use a completely different set of DIY tools. It seems like an auto mechanic uses roughly the same set of tools as everyone else, just better versions of them and with greater skill.
- gregjor 4y ago
  A non-programmer wouldn’t use anything we’d call a toolchain. They would use a WYSIWYG editor like Word, and still not understand formatting or how to print.
  - strken 4y ago
    I'm happy to say Word, whatever version of PDF ULTRA DELUXE PRINTER 9000(TM) turns up first in search results, and Wix are at least analogous to a toolchain. It's three tools that they'd use in sequential steps, taking the output of each step and using it as an input to the next.

bmitc 4y ago

The more apt analogies would be: * "chng af" * "tglCB" I will continue my crusade to fight against this and spell things out until my death.

gregjor 4y ago
Learning some jargon and specialized skills most people don’t need or care about doesn’t make a person smarter or better, nor does it mean everyone else is ignorant or too dumb. Showing off and complaining about the dumb masses is vanity, not professionalism.
- bmitc 4y ago
  I was just using your examples to comment on the common programmer practice of needlessly shortening words and names of things or, even worse, intentionally quirkily naming something to make a specialized word or domain even more specialized. It's a practice that I do not like, as it arbitrarily creates an additional layer of obfuscation.
  - gregjor 4y ago
    At one time memory constraints made the short names necessary. Not a technical issue anymore. Now we have autocomplete in the shell. But what do you expect from a professional caste who debate endlessly about efficiency and “productivity” supposedly improved a fraction by a keyboard or typeface or color scheme?
    - Espressosaurus 4y ago
      Let me post another article about how I can save 10 seconds by using Emacs for my toaster!
IshKebab 4y ago
Hear hear. I don't think programmers - as a group - get to complain about people not learning programming tools while simultaneously making them so unapproachable (especially Linux things). It's not just the overuse of acronyms. There's also: * Religious devotion to the CLI despite it having terrible discoverability. * Really bad naming. Git is probably the worst offender at this, but the whole of Unix is a naming mess. WTF is `usr`? Is that where user files go? * Generally over-complicated tooling. A good example of this is Node/NPM. So complicated to set up! Contrast it with https://trunkrs.dev/ https://trunkrs.dev/ * Deification of distro packages. No I do not want to spend half of my development time packaging my app for 10 different distros. I guess I'll go with curl | bash then. * Distain for binary app distribution. I'm looking at you glibc.
- bmitc 4y ago
  Thanks for being one of the rarities top understand. Gives me a glimmer of hope. I agree with everything you said.

strken 4y ago

I think the interesting bit isn't the jargon, it's the parallel but separate paths of computer use. Changing an car's air filter is obviously different from driving. Flipping a circuit breaker is like flipping a switch, just for the whole house, and also it happens automatically if you anger the switch by plugging too much stuff in or dropping the toaster in the sink. Both of them make sense intuitively. Changing a .md file seems like it should be the same thing as changing a .docx or .odt file, since they're all different kinds of formatted text, but for some reason you need an entirely different toolchain. My resume needs to be compiled using wkhtmltopdf, pandoc, and make. It's deployed using Dokku, which wraps Docker, and the Heroku static site buildpack, which wraps nginx. It's kind of weird that a non-programmer doing the same thing would use a completely different set of DIY tools. It seems like an auto mechanic uses roughly the same set of tools as everyone else, just better versions of them and with greater skill.

gregjor 4y ago
A non-programmer wouldn’t use anything we’d call a toolchain. They would use a WYSIWYG editor like Word, and still not understand formatting or how to print.
- strken 4y ago
  I'm happy to say Word, whatever version of PDF ULTRA DELUXE PRINTER 9000(TM) turns up first in search results, and Wix are at least analogous to a toolchain. It's three tools that they'd use in sequential steps, taking the output of each step and using it as an input to the next.