ghassenfaidi

I can picture in my mind the image of a mechanic that likes and enjoys fixing things. But I do wonder how much of it is real joy. At the end of the day what drives most people is that they want to satisfytheir human needs. bring food to the table. That's life for most people on Earth, then can find meaning elsewhere. And even those who are "passionate", as I said, I do wonder how much of it is pure fun. I asked doctors and engineers about this before, many of them don't feel the constant passion that I see in the picture I imagined. Again, it's a small percentage of the time. When you see a happy patient, when things go as expected, when the final test passes... But what drives most people isn't passion. It's responsiblities and satisfying human needs. And can probably become a great software engineer without falling in love with programming. I'm probably over-analysing what you said though, I do get what you say.

> "Coding isn't the hard part, it's the challenging part"

So what you're saying that it's a challenging part but not the hardest part? If so, that sounds fair as a take to me. But I don't get your point about "if you enjoy the challenge then it's easy". And It feels to me it's the opposite. You'd only start enjoying it once you've spend a lot of time practicing and honing your skills. (and I don't think it's that fun, it's like... 5% of the time fun? i.e. when you suddenly understand a bug or something or when all of tests pass in TDD)

by the way it feels to me that teaching is one of the most satisfying jobs on earth, you could (and should) be passionate for hours long in front of your students, that's amazing. as a programmer it seems you'd only feel passionate for like 5% of your work, even before AI it wasn't all that joyful, you had to attend boring meetings, debug legacy code bases, trying to make sense of the bad decisions other made (including yourself), it's fine, it brings food to the table. I think the myth of "passion" has affected way too many youngesters though. You can find meaning in many things in life, and there are already way too many people who kept chasing their "passion" yet at the end realized it didn't bring them real happiness. Maybe this AI thing is good for us after all, maybe we should take a pause and answer the harder question.

Edit: and yeah, even teachers probably have lots of chores and boring parts of the job.

might be a good chance to sit with yourself and understand what you want to do in this life, we often think there is only one path in life and seek success as defined by society. Most of us neglect ourselves way too much, thinking we're seeking the right thing. It's a problem if we can only find joy in life in trivial things like work or even hobbies. It means we might be disconnected from ourselves. Also If you feel you need professional help you absolutely should seek it. Healing in this toxic society does take a lot of time and professional help can be really good sometimes.

From what I learned, a disorder is defined as a condition that significantly impairs a person's daily life. And autism is not always a disorder. That's why "autism spectrum" is considered a better term.

> ... Because this actually leads to a distorted understanding of programming languages. So it's not always that simple; it's not either "terms don't matter" or "I'll kill you if you misuse it!".

what do you mean?

The thing is, often it's wrong and could mislead people. especially for beginners who would trust the tool too much. You could easily ask "is HTTP same as REST?" And you may receive a table like this (which many people prefer than reading the rest of the response because it's faster) https://imgur.com/a/JRkUIkx same if you ask "is deep learning same as neural networks?" you may receive this https://imgur.com/a/MgVkD4u It can really compare anything and won't complain. and there are much more subtle questions.

I realized many arguments end up not well because we keep focusing on the wrong thing and neglect the question that actually matter: why do you believe in what you believe; asking people to define the terms they use is also helpful and forces them to be precise and think more about their beliefs, which a healthy thing to do. People are often much nicer than we think when we approach them with kindness and they can see in our eyes that we actually care about them and not just winning. Yet at the same time we need to lower our expectations. Because we need to be kind to ourselves, otherwise we would feel too frustrated. I'm talking about daily life arguments. In some online arguments or public debates, sometimes you need to be harsher to protect others from what you claim and believe is wrong.

I also think it has something to do with Windows and growing up around GUIs, for instance, when I was starting out I used to think it's impossible to name a python file "script.mp4", how could that be! even VS code won't color it for you! -- I think it has something to do with what happens when you change the file extension in the file explorer and the scary warning one sees.

Last year I actually took a course called Systematic Program Design which based on the book How to Design Programs, it was an amazing experience and I heard it has some resemblance to SICP. but I plan to read SICP someday.

The plot twist was that programs are just files too -- what I meant earlier is processes and not programs.