ebjaas_2022

It's the nature of most types of volunteering work. If you sign up to be the conductor of your local choir, you have the same thing. People start expecting you to do stuff. If you're going to be in that role, as ploxiln says, you need to be OK with that part of it. You have to be OK with the thanklessness of the task, and you have to seek your rewards elsewhere. Still, I feel very sorry for zloirock, and I hope that he gets some kind of compensation for his work, at least enough to get his life back together.

It's a person who applies engineering principles to the design and implementation of software. It's about the "rigidity" of the methods that are used to construct the software. If the software is just cobbled together, it's not "engineered".

I had a colleague some years ago, who consistently said 'add hook' instead of 'ad hoc'. I never had the heart to correct him.

Usually it does have all the information, it just isn't able to put it all together. If you for instance ask it to name the female tennis players who have won the Wimbledon tennis tournament twice, but not more than twice, it will give you a plausible list of names, but at least half of the names on the list will be wrong.

If you then ask it to tell you more about one of the players that has been wrongly named, it will actually be able to tell you the correct number of Wimbledon wins for that player. It does know the facts. It just doesn't know how to put the facts together into new useful knowledge.

That's a prediction you'll make only if you're not a programmer yourself. The entire purpose of a programming language, as opposed to a natural language, is to be able to communicate precise intent to a computer. A programming language is designed to be able to communicate precise intent, and a natural language isn't.

Even if you could, you would not want to use natural language to instruct a computer. You don't want the AI, or the computer, to guess your intent.

44200 hits on Google, for that particular misspelling.

Dave Cutler is, seemingly, a good example of this. If you have not read it, I recommend the book Show Stopper! by G. Pascal Zachary, about the development of Microsoft Windows NT under his leadership.

I don't agree with this article. I write hundreds of lines of notes each day, as a part of my coding and work routine. I do it all digitally, in Visual Studio Code, as pure text. I think, as long as you can write fluently on a keyboard, and as long as the writing and typing itself does not steal CPU cycles from your brain while you're doing it, it works just as well as handwritten notes, and, I would wager, probably even better, as you're able to write quite a bit faster on a keyboard than you are when you're writing with a pen.

As for the "slowness" of the writing being a point in itself, I don't think that's true. I achieve the same by editing my text as I write it, pondering over my wording, to make sure that I communicate (to myself, mind you) the precise intent that I'm going for.

I think the fondness for handwriting is mostly based on romantic notions, for lack of better words, predicated by our closeness in time to a period where handwriting was much more common. We think of it as the "original" way of writing, and the most "pure" way of writing. Personally I think jotting down text notes on a keyboard is just as "pure", and I don't really think that there are any extra qualities associated with handwriting, as far as learning and retaining information goes.

I think you just have to make yourself do it for a prolonged period of time, all the while making sure that you do not overexert yourself. Make it pleasant on every occasion, and lower the intensity once it starts feeling like a struggle. There are theories on how long it takes to establish a new habit. The numbers may vary, but I'd say if you can keep at it for around three months, it should be possible, for anyone really, to establish regular exercise as a habit that you both enjoy and look forward to, rather than something that you dread or put off.

> rather than on the finding and promotion of undiscovered geniuses.

There's a catch in it as well, which is that you cannot really identify a genius up-front. A genius is, by definition, someone who thinks differently. A lot of people think differently. But the thing with the genius is that he thinks differently and correctly. The latter part won't be obvious until after the fact.

When Alex Ferguson started out as a Manchester United manager he probably already was a genius, but it wasn't obvious until many years later.

Same with Sergey Brin and Larry Page. They probably had a genius vision for the company right from the start. But it's only in retrospect that we recognize that it was, in fact, a genius vision.

Finding a genius is, I think, almost by definition, impossible.

Software development is inherently hard, and many software developers suffer from impostor syndrome. It's easy, within software development, to start doubting your own work, because there are so infinitely many ways of solving each and every problem. You're never quite sure if your way of solving it is the best, or if it's even any good. It all floats in the air, sort of. I think that's why we're vulnerable to criticism of it.

How did it affect you?

> most of the hard problems were solved in 1960 to 1980

Yes, if you're talking about sorting algorithms and similar. But there are, of course, still many, many even harder problems waiting to be solved. Harder, because they are compound, and more complex. There's still need for top talent. But it's true that most "ordinary" businesses do not need those types of programmers.

> abandoning engineer culture in craft of software development

I think it's just a function of the rapid growth our field has seen over the past few years. With 'everyone' becoming software developers, and new frameworks being launched every day, it's just hard to promote long term planning and the following of sound engineering principles. With the current rate of change, software is seen as 'disposable', promoting more of a hacker culture, and less of an engineering culture.

> I can "literally" see how people think about software when reading source code and pull requests (I say literally because these things are... objects I can manipulate in my mind? it's hard to describe, and it took me a while to realize not everybody sees it this way).

I think you're right.

The impression I get when I talk to an autistic person, or when I cooperate with him on a problem, is that he sees my thoughts and my ideas as "entities" within his own mind. This rhymes with what you say, that you perceive it as if other people's thought patterns are "objects that you can manipulate in your mind".

My subjective experience is that the autistic person will "dive into himself" to find the answer to who I am, in a given situation, while the non-autistic person will look outwards. It's as if the non-autistic person processes me in real time, using a massive parallel social GPU in his head, while the autistic person, instead, consults massive internal lookup tables to try and derive the same information.

I think the difference is fundamental. It has to do with the very "shelf system" in our brains; the way that we have stored information about the world, and made sense of it, since we were small kids. It's not something that we can change as adults, I think.