Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

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So people used to think there was only one standard-issue type of brain, and that everyone's brain operated in the same way and could learn the same things equally well, and a single optimal technique could be developed and taught once to everyone. The Taylorist dream, among others. But left handed people kept stubbornly existing, despite the beatings. And then education discovered that dyslexia and dyspraxia are things. And the not-well-understood category of "non-neurotypical" people currently classified into conditions like autism, Aspergers, ADHD etc. Eventually we're going to learn to fit the technique to the human rather than the other way round. People over processes, and all that.

This may explain why people have strong-but-wildly-different opinions about which programming languages are "intuitive". Maybe some are just ""left-handed"", in a very non-literal sense.

(I'm a left hander from just slightly after the "beating children for being left-handed" era, but I expect there's someone in the audience who remembers it)

> Maybe some [programmers] are just "left-handed"...

This is very insightful, and I'll try to remember it the next time I'm tempted to get in a debate about "the right way" with someone...

Something that I have to ask my self over and over when criticizing someone else code. "Is this wrong, or is it just not the way I would do it?"

Even if we make lots of adjustments to teach according to the child's needs, I think one glaring issue will remain and it's that we read and write left to right. Which is an issue for left handers no matter what. Pushing the writing implement and dragging your hand over what you just wrote seems inevitable.

I have heard that there are left-handed pens. Geometrically and mechanically, they're the same as regular pens. The difference is that they hold faster-drying ink.

I have not actually confirmed this, or even seen them for sale. I don't even know where you'd go to buy them (Amazon, probably). But if you're a lefty, it might be worth looking into.

Here in Germany (where fountain pens are normal in school) you see them all over the place. Never heard about variations with in ink though, rather it's about the shape of the pen (many aren't symmetric) and the cut of the nib, so it works better at typical angles.

We got taught in school to write at an angle, so the hand stays below the already written text.

I remember that era. I was taught in the transition from the Socialist System (1991) to the Capitalist in (Eastern) Germany. Thanks for your comment, it very well resonated. Maybe that is why I constantly criticize process-driven tools, e.g. Jira, SAPCRM. We need creative tools like AutoCad or Emacs even for service clerks.

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