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> If you struggle with Linux, go watch YouTube videos where Linus Torvalds talks for a couple hours. I swear the next time you open a command line or work within a slipshod hideous UI that I guess just works, or something, you'll somehow feel this uncanny relief because you know Linus.

Doesn't make any sense , Linus Torvalds doesn't work on making command line or UI, I can understand if this was about writing kernel drivers or writing programs calling kernel API , The command line and other UI are much abstracted away from the kernel no?

To be clear, I don't have a deep understanding of Linux. But let's keep going with your train of thought regarding abstraction.

When I know it's "January" for whatever reason, and not "First Month", without knowing HOW and WHY this is the convention, it sucks. But then you see what Janus looks like - which, in this case, makes it even better for some reason than "First Month." In the case of programming languages and systems, many of these mythological figures are still alive and we can ask them questions.

So, with Linus, I'm approaching it from the individual differences angle. Some people will call IT if "Smooth edges of screen fonts" is turned off. "Why is this like this?? I can't work like this!"

Whereas I don't think Linus would notice, and if he did I doubt he would care. There's something about understanding where a creator of any given thing falls on that continuum that I find really helpful in overcoming friction with the "why is bad thing that could be good, by my likely ignorant definition, so bad!!" when it comes to new languages or systems.

Tangential, but I want to go back in time and ask some ancient Danes why #70 and #90 in Danish simply had to be absolutely ridiculous, given any possible alternatives. It still wouldn't be my preference, but something about understanding their perspective would be helpful.

> When I know it's "January" for whatever reason, and not "First Month", without knowing HOW and WHY this is the convention, it sucks. But then you see what Janus looks like - which, in this case, makes it even better for some reason than "First Month."

That's interesting, especially because I can't really relate to that. Don't get me wrong, I love this kind of trivia, but not knowing something like that has never been a problem for me at all.

I had the same thought!

Is this perhaps related to learning a language as a child versus as an adult?

As a child in an English-speaking household, "January" is just one of a million other things to pick up, and you just pick it up. As an adult learner, I can imagine it's very difficult because it seems so random; it's yet another thing that doesn't fit into a system so you have to memorise it and try to internalize it.

As a native English speaker, I find it very difficult to remember weekday names and month names in other languages. Mnemonics help, and knowing the derivation of the word can make for a good mnemonic.

Edit: re-reading the GP comment, sounds like it's not so much about mnemonics, more that knowing the historical reasons for weird design decisions can make it easier to accept them. Like knowing why "October" isn't actually the eighth month.

I think it's easier for me to accept weird natural language things from the distant past.

But for relatively recent programming language things? Oh man.

std::cout << "why"; std::cout << "why"; std::cout << "why";

std::cout << std::endl;

// It just rolls off the tongue.

    using namespace std;

It's fine, I won't tell anyone.

> So much of coding requires sitting inside the mind of some mid-20th century dude with a very different model of the world than we have.

Not sure if the some people view of the world should impact the way programming languages are constructed.

It's like saying you dislike math proofs because you have different views on the world from Gauss or Hilbert. That a triangle might be a rectangle because Pitagora had an old view of the world which doesn't fit today's fashion and politics.

> very different model of the world than we have

Who are we? There is no we. There is no we against them. That's the thing about diversity. My background and world view is different than yours.

People like me. You're illustrating my point.

Linux/Linus maybe isn't quite the best example here perhaps because it was heavily inspired from MINIX and other Unix-like OSes.

But yeah I can see that understanding the roots of a technology, of the creator's views of the technology and the problems its solving would certainly alter our perception of it and make it more enjoyable.

There's a lot of things that reasoning about requires getting into someone else's headspace. If that is problematic you may want to look into your empathy skills, 'getting into someone else's headspace' is a crucial life skill, IMO

This emotive approach to computer science might be inefficient but meaningful for rare questions of taste and ideology (e.g. substring functions: lengths or indices?), but I don't see how it could possibly help learning hard details (e.g. what escape codes can show up in your strings?) or even universal theoretical concepts (e.g. how do you use these synchronization primitives correctly, and why?).

From a more positive angle, you shouldn't worry about understanding "a very different model of the world" because, being a mathematical model of the world it cannot be much different from yours.

> If you hate C++, go watch Bjarne get interviewed.

That's why you shouldn't watch interviews. If they're good speakers they'll trick you into adopting their views.

Or you'll gain a tiny bit of empathy and understanding of where they came from and what it was like walking in their shoes. Doesn't mean you have to agree with everything they say.