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Comment by chantepierre | Hacker News Reader

Your comment brings me back to my first mirror making adventure, I was absolutely overwhelmed by the jargon and acronyms used by the mirror making community... a few years later I internalized it and use it as if it was common knowledge. I should put little explanations or details in my posts.

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A friend of mine once told me - learning a new field is all about learning the language of that field

What they hear:

"Exorcise the lattice hoard to siphon the new incarnation."

What we said:

"Purge the web cache to download the new version."

That metaphor would here be pretty accurate, though.

I think that's probably not an accident.

A friend of mine asked me why we have such precise terminology in IT; I asked her why English has so many different words for "chair".

That's a big part of it, but far from everything.

I'm not really sure - I deliberately stopped there because the concepts related to that field are a part of the language learnings.

If you are a really big fan of something, you'll get familiar with the lingo, but that doesn't mean you can play StarCraft well or weld or shred your guitar.

That's actually part of why FizzBuzz was so notorious: there were (apparently) plenty of people who could talk the talk about programming and software engineering, but couldn't do FizzBuzz.

You're right, people write code all day long and have no idea what pattern it is that they've just applied.

Having said that, they cannot communicate that that's what they want done, nor can they receive instructions to do something that way.

They really are hand in hand.

> You're right, people write code all day long and have no idea what pattern it is that they've just applied.

Thanks for agreeing with me, I guess. I was actually making the opposite point:

People who can talk about creating software, but who can't actually create any software.

Yes... and I was pointing out that people who think that they can write software... cannot talk about it, making them...?

You're completely missing the point that doing and talking are necessary in a world where developers aren't the only ones working on a project.

What use is someone that can write a priority queue, but not be able to be asked to write one, or to tell anyone to write one?

The same as someone who can ask for those things, but cannot do it themselves... right?

There was enough there for me to get the basic idea, which is fine I think. Can't really expect every niche post to have all the details necessary for a general audience and it's fun to get a glimpse into these worlds anyway.

Thanks for sharing the post!

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