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Comment by farfatched

4 days ago

> If you’re a programmer, you might think that the fiddliness of programming is a special feature of programming, but really it’s that everything is fiddly, but you only notice the fiddliness when you’re new, and in programming you do new things more often.

I think I'm drawn to programming because the fiddliness is tractable, and fixable.

In which other domain can I:

* introspect the relevant processes/state, step by step

* snapshot/undo

* fix niggles, once and for all, and for everyone; and get their fixes too

* probe and test my inputs and outputs, checking for quality. Get notified if a part changes in a way that breaks me.

And the only tool I need is a commodity general purpose PC.

When I try woodwork, or even electronics, I'm struck by much friction is in even simple tasks: tools, parts, lead time, safety, space, physical effort, cost, ...

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farfatched

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dwd  4 days ago

Unless you have endless budget, many things can be one-shot. You can't do a test run first, or roll back a cut if the length is too short. You can patch misplaced nail holes, or re-dig a hole (messing up filling a hole with concrete is another matter) and hope you don't kill a tree transplanting it, but the end result isn't clean.

The best I could do with woodworking in the end to approximate programming was live with wasting some timber, leave a lot of margin on the main cuts and size all the pieces as a whole.

  • smokefoot  4 days ago

    Woodworking taught me a lot about planning and design. As a young person, I was like the authors brother. I just wanted to do the thing, not draw a diagram and figure out how much wood I need, or build a fixture to mark the stair lines.

    Woodworking (the more constructive, furniture-making kind), rewards a deliberate, controlled process and it savagely penalizes mistakes. Those lessons transfer well to other disciplines. I’d have been a much better student if I’d learned wood working in high school.

    • dwd  4 days ago

      Absolutely.

      Woodworking was part of my first 3 years of high school, but it was mainly about learning safety and tool usage and not planning, estimating, selecting or purchasing timber.

      These days I only want to go to the lumberyard once for a project. Learnt the hard way on my first project that you need to take the time to carefully select the timber - checking straightness, matching grain and also colour before I started. Major hassle and waste of time to have to go back to swap boards.

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inatreecrown2  4 days ago

Until the next OS update...

With wood you are up against nature. With software you are up against corporations and comities.

  • Animats  4 days ago

    > With wood you are up against nature.

    You're up against your wood vendor. Anyone familiar with Home Depot "fresh from the tree" lumber has discovered this.

zipy124  3 days ago

The fiddliness isn't necessarily fixable though, at least in business code. The code has to represent the real-world, and if the real-world is fiddly then the code must be fiddly too. The only way to 'fix' this is to restrict your code's representation of the world to some non-fiddly sub-set, but this isn't always possible.