Colin“Everything is a file”
Computing: Paradigm that underlies the incredibly successful Unix operating system
Woodworking: This is the worst workshop ever
Mina@abstractcode have you seen https://blog.sunfishcode.online/is-everything-is-a-file/ yet?
@meena I hadn’t, thanks.
@abstractcode i've seen lots of critiques of everything is a file, but i really thought this was pretty intriguing.
@meena I hadn’t really considered the edge cases and exceptions. It’s good that people are.
@abstractcode production code is basically a beautiful algorithm, wrapped in a dirty tissue paper and held together with gum that's dealing with edge cases
@meena And then it meets humans who are complex and weird and irrational and occasionally wonderful and that’s where the real problems start.
@abstractcode i love the cycle of, "we need to clean this code up!" — "oh, now I get why it was so messy…"
@meena The real world doesn't fall into a nice simple type hierarchy. Even the same thing can be seen in radically different ways by different parts of an organisation.
The lists about all the falsehoods programmers believe about names and dates and addresses and such are entertaining and also instructive that we should not just rely on our assumptions about domains. Which there is a strong tendency for developers to do.
@abstractcode it would be really cool, if developers realized that a General Programming Language is a Domain Specific Language for the task of… programming.
And so when programmers think they're really smart because they can do programming, it's literally just… The domain of programming — and if you're not applying that with a domain expert to their domain, all you're doing is creating self-serving programmes and nothing of value, or something that subtracts value, by being in the way.
@meena I've seen a talk by an industry figure saying "we need to be the gatekeepers for everything" but in the "we're so very very smart" sense not the "we should have professional ethics and not build dystopian systems" sense. I hope I'm a lot better at respecting the skills and domain knowledge of non-developers than I used to be. Fancy technology is a means not an end and not always the most appropriate means.
@abstractcode every couple of months I have reason to re-read or link Weizenbaum examines computers and society
@meena It would be nice if we stopped doing so much "ooh shiny" and considered applicability and also consequences. Give me competent ethical people over unethical genius* people every time.