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Comment by vanni | Hacker News Reader

Well, we programmers are WRITERS who have to think thoroughly and write very carefully, because our READERS always take our words literally, and we really don't want things to go bad.

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After being downvoted, I'm trying to understand what could have hurt someone sensibility. Maybe the word _writer_ feels far from the shiny tech scene, but in the end we ARE writers, and of the highest qualities. Kids understand what a writer does, your parents too. So I think that it is a good approach to explaining what a computer programmer does, in the end.

Your explanation makes sense to me. My son is 5 and loves Lego. I just tried explaining that someone had to write the instructions in the book, that my son has to follow to build the final piece.

The programmer is the instruction writer, the computer is the lego builder.

Like any analogy, it isn't perfect, but for a 5 year old, that was enough to satisfy him for now.

A guideline to keep in mind (from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html): "Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized."

Also: "Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading." Though I'm personally fine with legitimate questions about expected behavior.

Code is speech in the US:

This court can find no meaningful difference between computer language, particularly high-level languages as defined above, and German or French... Like music and mathematical equations, computer language is just that, language, and it communicates information either to a computer or to those who can read it.

- Judge Patel, April 15, 1996

Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-estab...

My fiance recently tried to explain in a foreign language to a lady of advanced age which she is taking care of what is it that I do. The term writer was the closest thing that made any sense to that lady.

Did the language not have a word for programming? As in "progam" a thing to do X or Y?

It has(Italian), but how do you explain this concept to someone who was born before Turing's groundbreaking paper was published and worked most of her life for a newspaper?

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