That's why I added "across the country". I guess its a bad analogy.
I agree with the premise of the article but I just don't think going back to manual coding is the solution.
Here's my new attempt using puzzle as an analogy which I wrote yesterday:
Starting last year, I noticed coding was getting less fun. It’s like buying a puzzle set and finding out there’s an auto-complete button. Press it and the puzzle solves itself. Faster than me, better than me, prettier than me. It’s like playing a game with cheats on.
I don’t even have to touch the pieces anymore. I just tell the auto-solver what I want. Tell it I want a bird, it gives me a bird. A pirate ship? Here’s a pirate ship. At first I never imagined it could do a rocket, but with its help, that went from fantasy to reality fast.
Sometimes it doesn’t quite match what I wanted, but usually just telling it what’s wrong fixes things. The whole process is so fast that, if nothing’s broken, I don’t even bother looking at how it actually solved it. That would just waste time.
But coding felt less fun with this new assist mode.
The fun of puzzle-solving is gone. That feeling of trekking through the hard parts and finally reaching the summit is gone. Now it’s like taking a cable car up.
Before, I had to think alone for a long time, try things, experiment, until I finally cracked the problem. Now with the assist mode, it’s like doing college homework where the teacher already has the answer key. I just ask and I get a standard answer.
Coding went from craft to management. “I” went from a craftsman with standards to a foreman watching workers do the job. It’s just not the same. And “foreman” sounds kind of weak.
> DO NOT JUST PASS THE SECOND BALL BETWEEN YOUR HANDS. This is a common thing, as people are regularly taught it
People are really regularly taught it? Who's doing that teaching?
I suspect a different cause: cartoons. Especially in older animation, juggling was typically presented in the 'circle' style, which is probably where people tended to pick up the misconception. I guess that animation is a lot easier to produce.
I grew up in the boonies back in the 80's. The only real contact I had with juggling was probably cartoons like described above. I really wanted to learn though and would walk around the woods for hours trying to juggle oak galls in that "circle style" only able to keep it up for a few seconds at a time.
My first day at college, before classes started, I was in the dorms. Everyone was getting to know each other, and I saw someone juggling the right way. It instantly clicked. All the hand-eye practice the 'wrong' way actually helped. That's why I always tell people that the first thing I learned in college was how to juggle.
In my experience they're not taught it, it's instinctive. The easiest way to get a free hand seems to be to hand a ball over to your other hand directly. It makes sense too, it's counterintuitive that it's much easier to throw the ball up and over back.
> Infuriatingly, some apps try to be smart — only one line, return submits
Tbf, this is almost certainly what the vast majority of people want, most of the time, from chat apps like Slack. It would be much more frustrating to have to click a button after each thought.
I also sent a LOT of Slack messages prematurely for the same reason. Used to it now, though. The more an interface emphasises the single-line nature of a text input, the better. Multi-line should never submit on enter, single-line always should.
I don't think you can add a new paragraph style in Docs. However, 99% of people I've known to use a word processor have never used that feature. Heck, I'd bet the majority of users don't even understand what a 'style' is; people just change the font size directly.
You are right on both counts and that is a bad thing.
World has had ctrl+b for bold forever, so people can start to use it and then upgrade to styles when they run into the limitations. Alternatively someone knowledgable could set Word to only allow a selection of styles.
Open and Libreoffice has had style support since forever. Its only docs that kneecaps its users learning journey like that.
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