@alyx @mona I use a Linux laptop at home and at work. I've consciously exited the entire MS stack because it's such an aggravation to deal with as an expert user. That's not an uncommon path for software developers - many stop over at the Apple issued BSD, but they have exciting times with the BSD + desktop integration.

@pnathan @alyx@icosahedron.website I should perhaps interject that Alyx (and myself, since we are basically two aspects of one personality) are not computer people by training or temperament. Our education is in the physical sciences (chiefly chemistry) and in the liberal arts (I am a classicist, among other things, with a B.A. in the subject) but we feel driven to learn more of computer programming for creative reasons.

@mona @alyx ::blink:: ah, a multiple? Ak.

I'm very familiar with chemistry (and science) temperaments towards programming.

(and responding to your followup)

"there is no royal road for programming".

There's a sinusoidal difficulty curve.

imagine asking a chemist to give you the run of the lab after day 1 or 2... "I just want to get stuff done", you say.

It's been debated in CS education for 40+ years now. No answer has been found.

@pnathan @alyx@icosahedron.website

<<imagine asking a chemist to give you the run of the lab after day 1 or 2... "I just want to get stuff done", you say.>>

I could probably pull that off with a sufficiently persuasive display of ability ;=3

But seriously, while I appreciate the analogy, it seems a little faulty to me because the difficulties of chemistry and working with chemical equipment are almost entirely due to its being a _physical_ science. CS isn't a physical science

@mona @alyx all models are wrong, some are useful.

The basic problem is that computer software systems are built by many people, over a long period of time, with conflicting interests and expectations.

Learning to program effectively is attaining a gestalt of the quirks of the software system and then your hand is not seen to move, but your software appears.

http://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/chuang-tzu.htm I am always drawn to this passage.

@pnathan @alyx@icosahedron.website There's a lot to chew on in this series of posts...for me, any analogy comparing computer programming to any scientific or engineering discipline that I know is never going to quite work because compared to (say) chemistry, CS is at a level of development roughly compared to 1850. Nobody's even agreed on basic elements of how programs should be structured.

@alyx@icosahedron.website @pnathan There's been considerable work done at the low level. There's general agreement on how numbers and strings should be represented in computing, and on a certain subset of higher-order structures--yet _no_ standardization, weirdly, on the basic higher-order structures of mathematics. there's no standard matrix representation (I mean a mathematical matrix, not a 2x2 array), no standard polynomial representation...it's a complete mess.

@pnathan @alyx@icosahedron.website Software engineers are running around trying to build buildings when they haven't even agreed on standards for the shapes of rivets and girders, much less how buildings should be designed with those elements. Objects? functions? both? neither? again...it's a complete mess.

@alyx@icosahedron.website @pnathan Chemistry and other scientific disciplines didn't descend into this free-for-all, I think paradoxically because science used to a sort of club for educated men of leisure who were free to work away from commercial pressures. Computer science, on the other hand, almost immediately got corrupted by commerce. Any bad idea can get millions in funding these days if you sucker the right venture capitalist. If only chemists were so lucky!

@mona @alyx yah, there's a weird thing where if you're rich enough (or tenured enough) to *not care* about practical things, evaluation, results, anything, you can do some pretty interesting lines of research all day every day, when the whim takes you. which is a pretty epic level of privilege. but it... does get results after enough eccentrics get through with it.