@wakame @futurebird (b) in response to my grade 10 science teacher's response to a fundamental misunderstanding of how salt solutions work is why i have a BA and work in a notoriously innumerate-liberal-arts-major-infested profession today...

@futurebird @freequaybuoy though sometimes the problem is that a language requires spaces rather than tabs, or prohibits a mix of them... or the student was trained for decades on languages where whitespace didn't matter...

@futurebird @wakame conclusion: programming is a martial art

@wakame @futurebird so far this thread it seems to teach someone how to program a computer they must first learn

- conflict management and de-escalation skills
- theory of mind
- rationalist epistemiology
- emotional self-discipline
- scientific method (controlled testing)
- the art of doing things one thing at a time (and figuring out what "one" "thing" is when it might not be self-evident)
...

@wakame @futurebird (not that i don't make the mistake of checking everything from lines 8 through 64 after an error on line 32 without looking up to line 4, but that's more just lazily assuming that past me must've gotten "the basic stuff" right and any error must've been further down)

@wakame @futurebird
> the voice from god

i rarely had this problem and i also could never understand what people at church and elsewhere were talking about when they talked about feeling the presence of god or whatever

i just thought of it as pure cause and effect, like

you're rolling a toy car down a track
the track has a snag in it you can't see
the toy gets derailed and hits the floor
you don't look at the floor for the snag

@wakame @futurebird my immediate instinct is to object that these error messages are about the input, not the person sending the input, but making it not personal / not making it personal is also one of those important skills that everyone used to assume everyone had and no one taught and now no one has

@wakame @voltagex @itgrrl @futurebird [vague memory of a passage in solzhenitsyn about "engineers" and people who've never had to lay a brick]

@itgrrl @futurebird i never saw that in high school in the 90s...

@futurebird @mansr ...this just goes back to my whole thing about if maybe younger people have more learned helplessness about everything because more of their lives is dictated by arbitrary rules imposed on them by [EDIT: the invisible, untouchable people in some office somewhere who dictate] their cultural environment rather than the non-arbitrary rules of the physical world

no matter how dumb the rules of a sportball game get, the ball *must* move in certain ways in response to certain actions

that's not the case in a video game

@futurebird @mansr constantly grumbling the whole time you're fixing the problem about the idiots who design $THING like that can be a helpful coping mechanism for some

@futurebird
> 2. The error will make sense. It's not random. The computer does not "just hate you"

learning to have a constant faith in this has gotten me through so much shit that might otherwise have caused me to physically break something and give up forever

psychologically it's like "if you keep the spear pointed at the horse you will be safer than if you broke rank and ran" - you know logically that is what it is but every second of it is screaming at you to ignore that understanding and in the end what you train for will win out