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Comment by sofuture | Hacker News Reader

I didn't think it was all that bad, or at least I didn't read that far.

Calling text a "string" is one I am constantly trying to explain to my wife. "You know, some text, a string?" "No...?"

I think the problem I have with it is that a lot of it is about trying to out-geek other geeks. Like when someone says, "Oh yeah, well I'm so nerdy I dream about code!"

I used to do that only once or twice (as far as I remember), and that was when first really learning Scheme and wrapping my head around functional programming.

But I am guilty of coming into office barefooted just to outgeek.

Last night I had a dream that I was telling a coworker he should use reinterpret_cast for something. But I'm not going to go bragging about it and I think it may be the only time I have ever actually dreamed about coding.

Funny you should mention that. Years ago, when I was learning Lisp, I dreamed one night that the whole world had turned into parentheses, producing an existential horror rather like the "Knife Eye Attack":

http://drmcninja.com/archives/comic/11p26

And the background music was Pink Floyd's "Any Colour You Like". This dream had background music. When I woke up, I was a lot better at Lisp than I was the day before, and the parens didn't bother me anymore. Nothing at all similar has happened since.

I actually do literally dream in code from time to time, but the code makes no sense, its more like a vague memory of me editing code rather than a meaningful program. I usually wake up with a smile on my face after such a dream.

I learned that people tend to understand better if you say "a string of characters". It still confuses people, but less so. I did this when explaining strings to intro-to-programming students; they don't get things right away, so it helps to include some redundancy in your words.

Actually, that's not a bad lesson for communicating in general.

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