My earlier post made me think of the image below, which was making the email rounds a few years ago. I don’t even remember who sent it to me or where it came from, but it’s always been one of my favorites.
I’ve been programming in one form or another since I was eleven or twelve. That’s over two decades of coding. Not as much as some, but still more than most coders my age. I started with BASIC, learned only enough of the infuriating and overly verbose COBOL, and finally moved on to more useful languages when I was about nineteen.
It’s a mysterious process to some. Very often fellow high-school students would come over to my computer and look at what I was doing. They would look at the incomprehensible stuff on the screen and ask, “How do you know what to type?”
How does one answer this question? When I was young and socially inept I would try to give the questioner a little explanation about programming languages, which I think was a larger answer than they cared to endure. What they were really wondering about (but didn’t know how to ask) is how so much (seeming) gibberish can do something meaningful. The problem was that programming was a mystery to them. They were familiar with other complex tasks like playing the piano, building a house, flying a jet, or writing an essay, but none of them had any idea what programming was or how it worked.
The next generation doesn’t seem to have this problem. My younger brother (thirteen years younger) doesn’t know how to program, but he has some sort of grasp of the concept that these are instructions for the computer. He has some sort of framework to hang it on, and coding is not arcane magic to him.
But this ignorance endures in previous generations, and causes all sorts of professional problems when I end up doing work for a client who knows nothing about what coding is or how it works.
CLIENT: Quick! We need you to build a house by next Monday!ME: Well, you don’t usually build houses that fast, but what sort of house are you looking for?
CLIENT: Oh, we don’t have all the details yet, but we know we are really going to need it by Monday.
ME: (Deep sigh) Okay, so give me some sort of rough idea. One story or two?
CLIENT: Probably one but we might decide on two later. I’ll get back to you on Wednesday.
ME: I kind of need to know that now. So is it going to be brick or wood?
CLIENT: Just make it an option.
ME: That’s what I’m doing.
CLIENT: But for later.
ME: Wait. You want to be able to switch between wood and brick after I build it?
CLIENT: That would be great, yeah.
ME: You can’t… I don’t… That isn’t… Look, it can’t be both. I just can’t. It has to be one or the other.
CLIENT: (disappointed) You sure? Okay then. I’ll talk to my boss and see what he says. I’ll get back to you tomorrow.
ME: I see. So how big is the house?
CLIENT: How would I know?
ME: How big do you need it?
CLIENT: Well, just make it as big as the property…
ME: Which is?
CLIENT: I’m not sure. We have a couple of properties we’re looking at. One is a half-acre, the other is a full acre.
ME: So you’re not sure what you want, what it should look like, or where you want it, and all you DO know is that you need a half-acre house by Monday?
CLIENT: Is that a problem?
ME: I really need to know these details.
CLIENT: Look, just get started right now, and we’ll fill you in on the details as we come up with them. I do have the details of how we want the roof to look, so you could start on that while you wait for the other info.
Keep in mind that this client is not a jerk, a moron, or a sadist. The problem is that they have no idea what I do or how I do it. When I tell them I need the specs of how the program needs to work, they will invariably tell me what they want the dialog boxes to look like. This is the part they see and understand, and this is the part they have in mind when they tell me what they want. Once the interface is done, then they can iron out all those “other details”, like what the thing does when you push all those buttons.
The hardest part of coding isn’t coding. The hardest part is getting people to tell you what they need.
Via Acksiom, I heard about this very amusing little movie.
And there is also a sequel:
The second one Reminds me a great deal of old Bugs Bunny cartoons. Visually it’s very different, but it’s funny, frantic, and wordless. It’s a story told with motion and music, much like many of the classic Loony Toons.
Both animations are clever and charming, and both are pretty generously animated. For example, there is a shot where the camera orbits the two characters for dramatic effect. This is a pretty labor-intensive thing to do, when the animator could have just as easily cut back and forth between two static images of the characters striking different dramatic poses. But the orbit move was a lot more interesting, so the animator went the extra mile. The extra effort shows.
Mark is reading The Big U, Neal Stephenson’s first book. I remember reading an interview where Stephenson downplayed this book. It was out of print for a while, and the buzz generated by his later book Snow Crash had inflated the price of The Big U, which displeased him. It was his first effort, and I guess he wasn’t very happy with it. For that reason I’ve avoided the book.
But now that I’ve read the passages that Mark posted I think I need to check it out. Have a look at some of the PC doublespeak from the book, and keep in mind the thing was written in 1984.
Mark also mentions that he isn’t expecting much in the way of an ending. That sort of goes without saying. Stephenson is a brilliant author, but by fault or by purpose, his endings always feel hurried, confusing, and unfinished.
Last time I mentioned that I put a little magic marker dot on the faulty disc and mailed it back to Netflix. I put two stickynotes – one on the disc and one on the sleeve – with each clearly describing the problem. Today, I got my “replacement” disc in the mail, and there is my little black dot.
Now I’m pissed off.
Keep in mind they have now done this twice. Two times they have gotten the bad disc, tore off the bright pink stickynotes, and mailed the exact same disc back to me. I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt before, but it takes a special blend of stupidity and apathy to do what they have done. I’ve now spent most of June mailing the same faulty disc back and forth with these morons.
My wife came up with a good idea, which is to request another copy without sending this one back first. This will force them to send a different disc, which might not have this particular problem. This might let me finally watch the rest of Last Exile, although I resent all this wasted time and effort. The notes were clear and those discs should NEVER have gone back into circulation, much less sent right back to me, the guy who wrote the notes.
I did find a phone number here, along with a few things that got on my nerves. First up:
Netflix is the #1 rated website for customer satisfaction for two consecutive years, according to ForeSee Results surveys in the spring of 2005 and January of 2006. In the fall of 2005, Fast Company magazine named Netflix the winner of its annual Customers First Award.
Really? A company with no customer service interface gets somehow rated #1 in customer satisfaction by some outfit which I’ve never heard of? Asinine.
Then this is just regular stupid:
Yeah, thank goodness for those solar-powered mail trucks.
I am noticing that when running a blog about D&D, videogames, and anime, gaming, it’s pretty hard coming up with anything to say while not taking part in D&D, not playing games, and not watching anime. The whole Netflix SNAFU was amusing for six or seven seconds, but that little quest isn’t going to provide any of us with lasting entertainment.
So where are we? I have Oblivion on the way, but that isn’t due until next week. I have Last Exile on the way again, but it’s anyone’s guess if it will be the right disc. I also have Full Metal Panic on the way, mostly by accident. I’m not really looking forward to it or anything, I just needed something from Netflix that wasn’t more Last Exile, since the remaining discs aren’t of any use until I can watch disc 4.
I better think of something quick, or this is going to turn into a “guess what I had for supper” blog. I don’t even have a cute little cat or dog to use for fallback material.
Some people are making fun of ABC for soliciting stories on how people have been affected by global warming*, but I can understand ABC’s point of view. Many people underestimate the difficulty in gathering serious scientific research data without a large pool of anecdotes to work from. I’m eager to contribute, because the resulting article might be the first ever to be eligible for both a Pulitzer Prize and a Hugo Award, which would be really cool.
What are you doing to reduce your “carbon footprint?”
Are you trying solar power? Hybrid car? Shorter showers? Energy efficient appliances?
At first I thought, “carbon footprint? But I don’t use GNOME at all!” Then I realized they are talking about the produduction of CO2.
What I’m doing to reduce carbon emissions:
I know going out and finding news is hard and the people (is it still okay to call them journalists?) at ABC are just saving energy by sitting around and waiting for news via email. I’m proud to do my part.
Okay, I’m done being silly. We now return you to our regular… whatever it is we do here.
* This morning they were asking “how have you been affected by global warming” and this afternoon they are asking “what are you doing about it”.
Just how big IS No Man's Sky? What if you made a map of all of its landmass? How big would it be?
The story of me. If you're looking for a picture of what it was like growing up in the seventies, then this is for you.
The comments on most sites are a sewer of hate, because we're moderating with the wrong goals in mind.
Back in 1999, I rode the dot-com bubble. Got rich. Worked hard. Went crazy. Turned poor. It was fun.
Let's ruin everyone's fun by listing all the ways in which zombies can't work, couldn't happen, and don't make sense.
This is it. This is the dumbest cutscene ever created for a AAA game. It's so bad it's simultaneously hilarious and painful. This is "The Room" of video game cutscenes.
You know how videogames sometimes do that thing where it's preposterously hard to go through a simple door? This one is really bad.
Deus Ex Mankind Divided was a clumsy, tone-deaf allegory that thought it was clever, and it managed to annoy people of all political stripes.
What is this Vulkan stuff? A graphics engine? A game engine? A new flavor of breakfast cereal? And how is it supposed to make PC games better?
Why Google sucks, and what made me switch to crowdfunding for this site.
T w e n t y S i d e d
