interesting that the UX of software has slowly evolved from document and dashboard metaphors to stream and event/alert metaphors, but the UX of code as seen by developers (DX?) really hasn't updated its metaphors afaict. It's all still "putting blocks together and running tests"
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at least that's what it looks like
I don't know what to call the underlying metaphor... building construction?
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Is there any good reading on DX metaphors? Feels like a lot of new shit has gotten thrown onto it... containers, just-in-time compilation, frameworks, orchestration riggings... but my mental model is still stuck in like 2004 era: write/compile or write/interpret loops
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oh yeah lambda type things don't neatly fill the building construction model at all
and of course machine learning/software 2.0 breaks the whole DX completely
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DOH! The core DX metaphor of code is “language”!
Even though programming has never felt like communication to me, even approximately. Not even like math.
It feels like mechanical and electrical assembly and rigging, not talking/writing.
Either I’m weird or the metaphor is bad.
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The whole industry is oriented around language literacy as the metaphor of ability. “What languages do you know” is the basic question even though every working programmer today seems to use several in complementary ways. But it’s not multi-lingualism.
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With human languages, “what languages do you speak at what fluency” is a much narrower question.
We make What programming languages do you know?” do the work that “where are you from/where did you grow up?” does with humans
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What you “know” to do with computing is similar to “nativeness” as in what you know to do in a country.
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Lead dev on a product team I led used to like the interview question “what’s your IDE set up like” to actually diagnose what a programmer could do. Not languages.
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Like “what kind of car do you drive?” reveals a shit ton about how you live in America
