It's either very funny or very depressing to watch executives trip over themselves to prove who has the worst understanding of what software development actually entails.

[ali@leftist.network]

@cloudhop

The rich has zero idea about the labour AND the product. For them, everything is just commodity. Maybe because they have zero taste.

Which might explain why most of the luxury goods are so ugly.

[bri7@social.treehouse.systems]

@cloudhop if programming is mostly typing, can we maybe consider designing better programming languages?

[cloudhop@equestria.social]

@bri7 Ironically i've been trying to help my friend design a new programming language but nobody seems to think that better type systems are worth bothering with, they just look at the syntax.

[bri7@social.treehouse.systems]

@cloudhop in
my humble opinion: better type systems, yes;

more type annotations and type syntax: no

[bri7@social.treehouse.systems]

@cloudhop more types does not lead to better types

[cloudhop@equestria.social]

@bri7 See, it's hard to explain to people that you need a much more complex and powerful type system in order to *reduce* type annotations precisely because of unsolved problems surrounding inference algorithms (which is precisely what broke our first attempt). For some reason most people seem to think "better types" means "more type annotations" and I'm not sure how to explain the difference.

[elexia@catcatnya.com]

@cloudhop what does he... how...

[elexia@catcatnya.com]

@jacel @cloudhop @xgranade if you have money you can afford to fail so many times

[timwardcam@c.im]

@geospacedman @cloudhop I have often wished that I could restrict my hiring of software engineers to people who could actually touch type (they're more likely to write things like comments and documentation) but sadly that would have limited the available pool. We're talking about the days when typing lessons in schools were only offered to girls, and most software engineers were boys.

[timwardcam@c.im]

@julesbl @cloudhop That was done for a while. Programmers wrote by hand onto coding forms which "punch girls" typed onto punched cards.

[brouhaha@mastodon.social]

@julesbl @cloudhop
That was actually common practice in the 1960s and early-mid 1970s. The people who did the typing were called "keypunch operators". Programmers would hand-print their programs on coding forms.
It may have been the case that most programmers did not have typing skills, but that was not the primary force driving that method of computer usage, and it certainly did not make programming faster.

[timwardcam@c.im]

@Lacey @cloudhop Not me. I was taught to touch type by a professional typing teacher (my mother).

[brouhaha@mastodon.social]

@TomF @cloudhop
I'm glad I learned to touch-type. At the time (around 1977), my junior high school actively discouraged boys from taking typing class, because that was "women's work". I was already using computers by hunt-and-peck typing, but my motivation wasn't primarily about speeding up typing. I was already well aware that a much greater portion of the process, and time spent on it, was thinking.

[brouhaha@mastodon.social]

@TomF @cloudhop
I'd hoped that touch typing would reduce my cognitive load (though I didn't know that term), making it easier to concentrate on the programming, and less on the typing. It did that somewhat, although I had already gotten so good at hunt-and-peck that it really wasn't as much change as I'd expected.

[krazov@mstdn.social]

@interru @cloudhop Also, articulating that intent to LLM is done by typing, as well.

[tomf@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@brouhaha @cloudhop Also, if you're writing code, all the punctuation means you're moving your hands almost as much as hunt-n-peck anyway.

[tomf@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@brouhaha @cloudhop Of course I'm not really "hunt-n-peck" as such - I use three fingers on the left hand and four on the right. But it's in a random-ass way I made up myself, with a lot of hand movement.

[miawinter@tech.lgbt]

@cloudhop "30% of all sewing is now done by our interns, this means our workers are no longer constraint by how fast they can change out the threads in their sewing machines anymore but by how clearly they can tell the interns to do it for them"

[cstross@wandering.shop]

@cloudhop More classically for software engineering, per Fred Brooks (1975): "one woman can produce a baby in nine months but nine women cannot produce a baby in one month".

[kwramm@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@cloudhop I knew it! Having taken a typing class over that expensive Comp Sci degree was the right choice! /s