I stopped caring about programming terms | Hacker News Reader

I stopped caring about programming terms

teadriven.com

15 pointsghassenfaidi25 comments

If “terms are simply created for understanding”, then why is their misuse so unimportant? Isn’t the whole point of a term’s use in understanding only obtained with the proper usage? Isn’t improper usage actually creating confusion and misunderstanding? Shouldn’t you care?

The author will have an interesting interview experience when talking to HR and devs that actually care about programming terms as selection filter.

> ... Because this actually leads to a distorted understanding of programming languages. So it's not always that simple; it's not either "terms don't matter" or "I'll kill you if you misuse it!".

gatekeepers will die on that hill

while the only thing that matters is you understand the mechanism and you therefore know how to apply it. it doesn't matter if you know the name, unless you want to Google it. but now with AI you can still find it. so take it easy.

engineers have never been about uttering words, they talk with their hands and minds instead, and like everybody, by putting their weight where it matters.

those in power enjoy words, as they can then define what they mean and start a fight to humiliate you, and enjoy the product.

> while the only thing that matters is you understand the mechanism and you therefore know how to apply it. it doesn't matter if you know the name, unless you want to Google it. but now with AI you can still find it. so take it easy.

Communicating with others about the design is my primary use for precise terminology. It's also very useful when giving AI architectural guidelines.

The mass de-skilling will continue, until Claude becomes unavailable.

what do you mean?

Look into what happened with machinists. "Feel" for the machine, and intuition for the craft was replaced by gcode. The work product, instead of the knowledge requisite to realize a work, became the container of value. With enough samples, a new approach is born in which understanding of the basics never has to crystalize. One merely hunts and pecks, grabbing errant bits of previous things hewn through understanding, and composing them into something close enough.

This is what lay ahead in the age of AI. The problem though, comes in the first time that system goes fully offline and people with sufficient skill to bring it back online no longer exist, or worse, are prevented from doing so for one group or another to maintain capability asymmetry.

The years ahead are certainly going to be something to adjust to, yet individually, I question whether that act of adjusting is a good thing.

that's not what this is about

the author wanted one single definition for terms like "module" in the field of programming, realized that there is not one, and stopped being so bothered about nailing down exact definitions, because words like "module" mean different things to different people and in different contexts

Is the author rebelling against the concept of context ?

programming is full of jargon, some of it is very specific, some of it is not, you have to learn that somehow, they've only been studying for 3 years

I felt this for a long time, but this helps me understand the challenge For instance, Autisim is a wide swath from what I know. Spectrum disorder makes more sense, but people not familiar with this treat Autism as true/false. Its so much more nuanced that that. Same goes for so many things as I get older. I agree with the author, take it easy when someone misuses a term that you hold a specific meaning to.

Autism being a spectrum doesn’t mean it is not a true/false. Both can be true. You can either be autistic (somewhere on the spectrum) or not on the spectrum at all.

Can you please elaborate?

To me autism is a spectrum, from statistically non neuro divergent (if there is something like that), to severely disabled (there may be more dimensions)

Neuro Typical is the term you are looking for. And, I agree with you about the spectrum. But people seem to take it more extreme.

Thank you for the term I was missing. What are the "more extreme" elements?

yw. I think people treat is as black/white true/false. Like autisim is mostly the same. Im my experiences, the spectrum is very wide. I heard someone refer to it as flavors which I thought was interesting.

You can be non-autistic, or you can autistic. And if you are autistic, you exist somewhere on the autism spectrum. If you are not autistic, you are nowhere on this spectrum.

From what I learned, a disorder is defined as a condition that significantly impairs a person's daily life. And autism is not always a disorder. That's why "autism spectrum" is considered a better term.

> And it was a deep lesson that now feels too obvious: terms are simply created for understanding. That is what matters at the end of the day. This isn’t just about programming; sadly, we often go through fierce battles over a concept or a problem while not realizing that each of us has a different definition for it.

Yeah, I think it’s interesting to think about programming in this way. At the end of the day, JavaScript is just a bunch of words someone invented and made a computer do something with, and you can also invent your own words to whatever you want too

IMHO understanding terms and concepts matters more than ever

working with AI for 3 months and now I'm having to use programming terms to get it going in the correct direction.

Too bad the author had a sketchy PL professor. (Side note: The theory of programming languages is better developed across the atlantic.)

Case in point: The so-called order of a function is a well-defined natural number. Languages are called higher-order when it is as facile programming with functions of order greater than 1 as with first-order ones.

A pity if the author never gets a second chance at that knowledge.

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