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Comment by dharmaturtle | Hacker News Reader

> [this] makes you dependent on the tools.

Socrates had a similar opinion w/r/t reading and writing:

> This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.

I feel like you and Socrates are incorrect for similar reasons.

Humanity advances when it can hide complexity. Tools help with that. To argue against tooling because it makes you dependent on the tooling is like telling the construction worker to put away the jackhammer and pick up the pickaxe. Programmers are super productive (compared to other professions) because we can build tools that make us better programmers. The leverage recurses.

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> Humanity advances when it can hide complexity. Tools help with that. To argue against tooling because it makes you dependent on the tooling is like telling the construction worker to put away the jackhammer and pick up the pickaxe.

Calling replacing ">=" with a ligature for "≥" "hiding complexity" strikes me as more than a bit of a stretch. They're two different visual presentations of the same thing, neither more or less complex in-and-of-themselves.

The ligature has some external complexity, though, in that for certain things I have to remember that that's "really" 2 characters in the file, and backspacing directly in front of ≥ will net me > instead of deleting the entire thing.

So if anything, ligatures are introducing a small bit of complexity that otherwise isn't there. Any relation to Socrates' quote seems forced.

I had autocomplete more in mind.

Reading code is harder than writing. It's good to make writing harder so reading is easier.

Socrates did actually have a point, though. This goes for all technology. Sure, it often makes us more capable in one way, but in many other ways, it reduces our capabilities.

Nobody today can memorize an epic like the Illiad today like people routinely would in Socrates' day. It a bit impressive if you can reproduce a 3 minute song text from memory. The Illiad often took days to recite.

Sure you can argue that tools (like writing) allow us to do more, to store more information, but the point is that they also cut us off from doing other things. Recitation from memory is available even when there is no paper.

This has gotten a lot worse recently, with tools like Wikipedia acting like external memory for a lot of people, granting them access to a lot of extremely superficial knowledge they don't actually possess themselves. It is certainly faster to look something up than to learn it, but a huge part of the benefit in actually knowing various things is to be able to connect what you are seeing now with something you know from beforehand, to generate a conclusion. That only works if you know the thing, you're not helped by theoretically being able to look it up.

The same with auto completion. Sure you can type faster, but it also means you, as a human, become less capable because you've never needed to hone the skills necessary to program without it. Programming without autocompletion is available in any text editor, even on paper.

Using tools is fine, but being completely reliant on them even to perform basic tasks is hobbling yourself. You turned yourself into an idiot in a powerarmor: Completely useless without your training wheels, unable to reason, unable to perform even simple menial tasks. I have a hard time seeing how that's made you, the human, more capable.

I think there's nuance to that. As in I think the truth lies in the middle.

I am someone that wants to know 'enough' about how stuff works underneath. I don't like too many magic tools. I need to understand enough about it to be able to diagnose and work around failures.

I have no qualms about using the tools though. I definitely want the jackhammer and the power armor! I want auto completion. It's awesome. It makes me so much more capable to quickly be productive in an unfamiliar code base or framework (if naming is sane ;)). If I don't have it? Sure I'll read the API docs and swear under my breath. Happens every time I gotta work on our python code. Could I do it better by having it in my working memory? Sure but I don't work with that code often enough for it to make sense to keep in memory (or learn in the first place).

The goal of most work is not to make you, the human performing the work, more capable - even when you're performing it for yourself.

The goal of work is to achieve a goal. Whatever achieves that goal most efficiently while not creating problematic "debt" is always to be preferred.

Your example of "writing code on paper" is a perfect example of a non-problem. When you write code on paper, the name of the function doesn't matter, since this is not executable code. So, whether you call it "sort" or "order" is fully irrelevant. Even if you "call" a function that doesn't exist, as long as the intention is well captured, it's not a problem. Say, if I'm writing "C" on paper and I write `arr.Sort()`, that will not affect anyone: it's simply a way to express what I want to do. If I'm ever going to write this as a program, I may use qsort(), or implement an actual sort function, or whatever makes sense.

Overall, memorizing things that don't need to be memorized "just in case" is more a circus trick than an actual useful skill.

> Nobody today can memorize an epic like the Illiad today like people routinely would in Socrates' day.

They can, and occasionally do. It tends to be people with a lot of spare time, or interested in memory techniques. And it probably helps if you know (ancient?) Greek, so it actually still rhymes. But it isn't super useful, so people generally don't.

If you paid people a living wage to recite the Iliad, you might get some more takers. We kinda do that, except it's actors in theatre plays or films. Sure, they don't take days to recite, but e.g. people put on several, different plays a year.

> It is certainly faster to look something up than to learn it

If it's faster to look it up, why bother learning it? Conversely, if someone had to look it up often, I bet it would be learned. Spaced repetition and all.

> The same with auto completion. Sure you can type faster, but it also means you, as a human, become less capable because you've never needed to hone the skills necessary to program without it. Programming without autocompletion is available in any text editor, even on paper.

I loathe this argument. Compilers or interpreters (computers in general) are sticklers for the exact spelling. Humans aren't; I still understood what you meant when you misspelled "Illiad". Why exactly spend the time and brainpower knowing exactly what something's called, as long as you have a rough idea of how the code works. Or, why spend the time typing it fully if you can have it auto-complete? When do you have to program in any text editor? Or even on paper, where the exact syntax can't possibly matter? (Equally, I'm sure that if this was a necessary skill, people could pick it up - occasionally they do, like for whiteboard interviews.)

Humans are very capable, and also lazy (one of the best engineering qualities). Don't mistake having no reason to do something with not being able to do something.

On your last point I'd add that using GitHub copilot has (at times) felt like pair programming to me. It has made suggestions for something I didn't know or think of yet, but I noticed that I remember that next time. So it's possible that I'm actually learning more when aided by tools, much like a teacher looking over my shoulder.

I used to work for someone who was convinced phone gps + maps would doom young people because if they became unavailable, everyone would lack navigation skills. I thought it was absurd. First, who was ever taught how to use a map explicitly (for basic usage)? Second, what is there to learn? I think these kind of arguments forget that most people are pretty bright, especially in times of need. If gps is down, I'm sure people can find their way to Burger King with a paper map and stopping to ask a few of the locals, just like everyone did intuitively back in my day. They just wouldn't have to walk uphill in the snow with onions on their belt, because the war.

> If it's faster to look it up, why bother learning it? Conversely, if someone had to look it up often, I bet it would be learned. Spaced repetition and all.

Because of what I said, knowing something means you always have access to it. Otherwise this type of hypothetical knowledge may be an unknown unknown for you, even though you could look it up, you don't know to do it. You have access to facts, not understanding.

Real knowledge enriches all areas of life. If you for example learn to write with a pen (not just to scribble crow's feet, proper calligraphy), you will never look at letters the same way again. You could go your entire life not acquiring this understanding, but your world would have fewer colors, less nuance. Handwriting also means you must think through what you want to write before you write it, which is another practical skill.

It's similar with music, if you learn to play an instrument, you will never hear melodies quite the same. Better still if you learn to dance, beyond an entirely new connection with your body, music will forever gain entirely new dimensions.

If you learn to cook, you will appreciate flavor in different ways, be able to pick the taste of individual ingredients when tasting a soup. It isn't just just "that's good", or "that's bad", but "oh, is that celery?"

It's not just about what this knowledge let you do, that is the least of my concerns, but how they shape your relationship with the world. If you only have access to the world through tools, you become cut off from experiencing it.

> I loathe this argument. Compilers or interpreters (computers in general) are sticklers for the exact spelling. Humans aren't; I still understood what you meant when you misspelled "Illiad". Why exactly spend the time and brainpower knowing exactly what something's called, as long as you have a rough idea of how the code works. Or, why spend the time typing it fully if you can have it auto-complete? When do you have to program in any text editor? Or even on paper, where the exact syntax can't possibly matter? (Equally, I'm sure that if this was a necessary skill, people could pick it up - occasionally they do, like for whiteboard interviews.)

This is not my problem with autocomplete, but rather that it prompts you with suggestions for things to type. I absolutely use shorthand when I write code by hand. My beef with autocomplete is that your programming turns into a series of multiple choice questions as to what to do next, rather than something you truly drive by yourself. How questions are posed absolutely shape what sorts of answers you will come up with, and if you are not the one posing the question, you will never truly be in control.

But how does memorizing all 33 methods of your AbstractBeanFactoryProviderImpl enrich anything?

Learning to play an instrument is enriching because you start to understand the logic/inner workings behind the music you listen to. You need the same skill for programming, sure, but I don't see how autocomplete would replace that.

> But how does memorizing all 33 methods of your AbstractBeanFactoryProviderImpl enrich anything?

Auto-completion is no doubt a large part of what's enabled your AbstractBeanFactoryProviderImpl to get those 33 methods in the first place. Which is a big part of my point, autocompletion shapes the way you think about code, shapes how you write code.

There are also a lot of examples of functions that, by name alone, do not do what they seem to do. That shouldn't be, you might say. But even in the face of that objection, they do exist. It would be very easy to jump to the conclusion that for example "Boolean Boolean.getBoolean(String)" parsed the string and returned its boolean equivalent.

> Auto-completion is no doubt a large part of what's enabled your AbstractBeanFactoryProviderImpl to get those 33 methods in the first place. Which is a big part of my point, autocompletion shapes the way you think about code, shapes how you write code.

Sure, but that doesn't necessarily make it better or worse. People have written horrible code without auto completion, just like they have written horrible code with auto completion. I'm not convinced that you just magically get better at thinking by making your life harder and typing more for no real reason.

> There are also a lot of examples of functions that, by name alone, do not do what they seem to do. That shouldn't be, you might say. But even in the face of that objection, they do exist. It would be very easy to jump to the conclusion that for example "Boolean Boolean.getBoolean(String)" parsed the string and returned its boolean equivalent.

And not having auto complete doesn't help with that at all. Auto complete MIGHT also include commentary for the function and explain what it does (if that commentary exists in the first place) and at least help with the issue.

> Real knowledge enriches all areas of life [...] if you learn to play an instrument [...] if you learn to cook

I don't disagree that there's value in knowing something. But I don't have a problem with people choosing what they want to know and invest time in (like cooking or playing instruments), and being able to ignore stuff that doesn't really matter to them (trivia, whether it's information on wikipedia, or random programming stuff).

In fact, that's one of the great things about modern times. There's more information out there than ever, so you can go really deep into an area (like calligraphy), even as a relative amateur. You can't do everything though, so it's a trade-off. Being able to forgo memorisation of things you don't want to prioritise is possibly a boon then?

I'm not sure of the equivalence of "knowledge"/rote memorisation vs doing an activity. We're getting a bit deep here. Personally, I'm not sure e.g. memorising the Iliad makes you that much better at writing epics, at least compared to trying to actually write epics (there's going to be some cross-pollination, but how large is that effect, and can you also get it by studying the Iliad without remembering it in its entirety?). At least memorising poems in school didn't make me better at writing them.

Or closer to home, is memorising random programming snippets (because of the lack of auto-complete) is superior to actually just writing code? Certainly studying e.g. a well designed standard library and noting design patterns is helpful, and knowing commonly used functions will make you more efficient, but there's no substitute for actually doing the thing/activity.

> Nobody today can memorize an epic like the Illiad today like people routinely would in Socrates' day. It a bit impressive if you can reproduce a 3 minute song text from memory. The Illiad often took days to recite.

AFAIK this isn't something that was very common back then. Reciting the Illiad was not a hobby but more like a paid profession. People paid for this precisely because reciting something for a few evenings from memory takes a lot of skill/training and most simply couldn't do it. Same as today.

It was an oral tradition. Recitation was how it was passed on before it was finally written down. You see the echoes of this in a lot of early Greek writing, they contain a large amount of quotes out of Homer. Being able to navigate this maze of "Darmok and Jalad"-speak with Homer quotes meant you were well educated.

Only thing I've found that comes close is some of Augustine's writing. He does the same with Bible quotes in his Confessions.

I know, I learned ancient greek in school, the history and writing was a large part of that. Most (I'd guess > 95%) of the Greeks weren't able to recite the Illiad if I remember that correctly, oral tradition or not. Even the best educated of them wouldn't really have been able to do so. They were familiar with the content, of course, just like a lot of people in what we consider the West are familiar with what the bible is about. But I'd be happy to be proven wrong about that, school was a long time ago :)

I wonder if it ever collapses. It's probably unlikely, the analogy of layers that strictly build upon each other might not be the best, but on every iteration where we hide complexity, some knowledge from a few layers down is lost, and we might do one thing more efficient now, but another thing in a more convoluted way, without even realizing. So it's hard to say whether it was worth the tradeoff. I guess everyone working in tech for long enough has some pet peeve about where something was way easier 20 years ago, or stories about junior devs frequently not knowing X and doing Y in a really dumb way, and are super surprised when they learn X and then get told it had been around for decades. It's obviously a net gain after all, but if you were able to look at it from a distance with total knowledge, it's also hilariously stupid. But then that's exactly how evolution works, and why there's a nerve going from your brain to your throat taking a detour around the aorta.

When I think about the "tower of abstractions" collapsing I usually end up coming back to the thought that it won't be a total collapse. It'll be a collapse to or around a specific layer of abstraction that we need to rework from (eg: something significant changed about a previously safe assumption). Like the 1906 earthquake in SF, it knocked down most buildings that had architecture that could not support the stress of an earth quake.

The best programmers I know are able to see through the abstraction and are comfortable getting into the lowest-level details. They have those skills because they've actually used them.

I'm not saying we'd be better off without optimizing compliers, but I do think every programmer should have practical experience taking the lid off and poking around inside.

There is a major difference between being able to poke into low-level details and being able to program at full efficiency in Microsoft Notepad or ed (which is what the OP seems to be advocating for).

One is a rare and occasionally extremely useful skill, the other is basically a party trick, like being able to recite the Illiad from memory.

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