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Comment by hi41 | Hacker News Reader

This story is very inspiring. How is he able to do his work without looking at block diagrams, complicated entity relationship diagrams, writing on paper to clarify among other things which I as a sighted person normally do?

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I thought you were being sarcastic, but apparently not.

Well, programmers have been doing their job for half a century without BS Entity-Relationship-Diagrams, UML and the like.

I don't think he's talking about the BS but merely scribbling down notes on paper which very often helps when trying to figure out complicated processes.

No, I was not sarcastic at all. I admire the programmer. I was just trying to understand something which was far outside my own experiences. I couldn't fathom how he was able to a successful programmer without the tools most of us use during the normal course of the day.

Sure, but that's perhaps true for more essential tools: seeing the code, the debugger window, the output, going through logs, etc.

The ability to see diagrams would be quite low in utility.

I worked at a company where a coworker insisted that we created a huge printout of all the database relationships. He spent a long time at it, and it took tons of paper. I glanced over it, realized it didn't do anything for me, and then promptly ignored it.

I've spent my entire programming career ignoring those kinds of charts and diagrams. I "see" the connections in my head without any visual representation at all. I simply know where things are, what they connect to, and how things work.

I'm not blind. I just don't get anything from those tools. It doesn't surprise me that this blind coder doesn't need them.

I wonder how much that can get in the way. I'm sure he adds insights into the development team from likely conceptualizing data and architecture vastly different than most people.

F$@? diagrams

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