Comment by darepublic
3 days ago
Nice essay but when I read this
> But we don’t go to baseball games, spelling bees, and Taylor Swift concerts for the speed of the balls, the accuracy of the spelling, or the pureness of the pitch. We go because we care about humans doing those things.
My first thought was does anyone want to _watch_ me programming?
No, but watching a novelist at work is boring, and yet people like books that are written by humans because they speak to the condition of the human who wrote it.
Let us not forget the old saw from SICP, “Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” I feel a number of people in the industry today fail to live by that maxim.
That old saw is patently false.
Why?
It suggests to me, having encountered it for the first time, that programs must be readable to remain useful. Otherwise they'll be increasingly difficult to execute.
2 replies →
A number of people make money letting people watch them code.
I vaguely remember a site where you could watch random people live streaming their programming environment, but I think twitch ate it, or maybe it was twitch -- not sure, but was interesting
[added] It was livecoding.tv - circa 2015 https://hackupstate.medium.com/road-to-code-livecoding-tv-e7...
No, but open source projects will be somewhat more willing to review your pull request than one that's computer-generated.
Better start working on your fastball.
I mean, I like to watch Gordon Ramsey... not cook, but have very strong discussions with those that dare to fail his standards...