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.
-
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.
@cloudhop if programming is mostly typing, can we maybe consider designing better programming languages?
-
@cloudhop if programming is mostly typing, can we maybe consider designing better programming languages?
@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 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.
@cloudhop in
my humble opinion: better type systems, yes;more type annotations and type syntax: no
-
@cloudhop in
my humble opinion: better type systems, yes;more type annotations and type syntax: no
@cloudhop more types does not lead to better types
-
@cloudhop in
my humble opinion: better type systems, yes;more type annotations and type syntax: no
@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.
-
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.
@cloudhop what does he... how...
-
-
@cloudhop Yeah, I remember all my software engineering skills I got from Mavis Beacon.
@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.
-
@cloudhop
I remember managers at a firm I worked for suggesting that the typists should enter the code to speed things up
-
@cloudhop
I remember managers at a firm I worked for suggesting that the typists should enter the code to speed things up@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. -
@cloudhop The number of times in 30+ years my development speed has been constrained by the speed of my fingers: 0.
-
@cloudhop A lot of people are absolutely horrified to discover I can't touch-type. Just never bothered to learn. Because it doesn't limit me.
@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. -
@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.@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. -
Software development is no longer constrained by typing speed, but by how clearly engineers articulate intent.
Writing code directly without AI articulates intent best. So, vibe coding is about articulating vague intent and hoping magic 8-ball fills the gaps im such a way that it covers your use case. -
@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. -
-
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.
@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"
-
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.
@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".
-
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.
@cloudhop I knew it! Having taken a typing class over that expensive Comp Sci degree was the right choice! /s
-
@cloudhop seriously... I spent far longer planning and designing a complex embedded system than actually coding it. Typing in the code is the easy part.
@AbramKedge @cloudhop My personal experience goes that coding often involves "quite some time" staring at code that is already there/thinking maybe even 2 ..3 days like that touching few lines at the time. Then you start getting "the new ideas" and could be a few days of "code this and that rinse and repeat" only finally you get "the moment" where maybe you can even write 5000 lines of code in a few hours where 4995 will be correct and 5 will take 2 weeks to debug
