12 Feb
2020
12 Feb
'20
6:12 a.m.
Steffen Nurpmeso writes:
Of course you are right, you will likely need to focus your mind,
and that requires an intellectual context, knowledge, to base upon.
Interesting that you mention this as I'm about to leave for a multi-day
advanced yoga workshop. One of the things that I like about yoga is that
you do have to learn to focus your mind, and it's amazingly difficult to
be focused on something as seemingly simple as standing up straight. I
don't think that it's reasonable to expect people to be able to focus
without training. Can you imagine if a computer tried to follow all of
your fleeting thoughts?
In some respects, this takes me back to the early days of speech recognition.
I remember people enthusiastically telling me how it would solve the problem
of repetitive stress injuries. They were surprised when I pointed out that
most people who use their voice in their work actually take vocal training;
RSIs are not uncommon among performers.
So really, what problem are we trying to solve here? I would claim that the
problem is signal-to-noise ratio degradation that's a result of too many
people "learning to code" who have never learned to think. Much like I feel
that it became harder to find good music when MIDI was invented because there
was all of a sudden a lot more noise masquerading as music.
I'm reminded of a Usenix panel session that I moderated on the future of window
systems a long time ago. Rob was on the panel as was some guy whose name I
can't remember from Silicon Graphics. The highlight of the presentation was
when Robin asked the question "So, if I understand what the SGI person is saying,
it doesn't matter how ugly your shirt is, you can always cover it up with a nice
jacket...." While she was asking the question Rob anticipated the rest of the
question and started unbuttoning his shirt.
So maybe I'm just an old-school minimalist, but I think that the biggest problem
that needs solving is good low-level abstractions that are simple and work and
don't have to be papered over with layer upon layer on top of them. I just find
myself without the patience to learn all of the magic incantations of the package
of the week.
Jon