Folks often act like you need to be some sort of math genius to be a computer programmer, but in practice, I find that my skills as a writer end up helping me more than my skills as a mathematician.
Programming is basically explaining what you want to happen.
Just, like, you’re explaining it to a helpful but exceedingly literal-minded space alien from the Eleventh Dimension who’s only had physical existence described to them, so you need to choose your words carefully!
Then how come, if I was in the 95th percentile on the writing portion of the ACTs, working with Rstudio in Statistics class was nearly the death of me?
Well, it was a statistics class. The thing you were attempting to explain to the computer was how to do (a certain kind of) math. You don’t need to know your math in order to write good explanations in general, but you do need to know your math in order to write good explanations of math.
Accurate
Eh, I don’t think this holds true across most people. I was a terrible programmer and most programmers I knew were at least as bad at writing. Some were worse.
The trick is that most programmers are terrible programmers, especially the ones who think that cultivating good communication skills is beneath them. I have never in my life met someone who could write good code who couldn’t also produce an easily understandable explanation of how it works – the two skill sets go practically hand in hand.
(Now, granted, I’ve met any number of folks who can write very clever code who couldn’t explain how it works to save their lives, but when you’re coding as a profession rather than a hobby, you quickly come to understand that “clever” and “good” are not the same thing!)
Tag: hmmmmmmmmm
Sometimes i think about the idea of Common as a language in fantasy settings.
On the one hand, it’s a nice convenient narrative device that doesn’t necessarily need to be explored, but if you do take a moment to think about where it came from or what it might look like, you find that there’s really only 2 possible origins.
In settings where humans speak common and only Common, while every other race has its own language and also speaks Common, the implication is rather clear: at some point in the setting’s history, humans did the imperialism thing, and while their empire has crumbled, the only reason everyone speaks Human is that way back when, they had to, and since everyone speaks it, the humans rebranded their language as Common and painted themselves as the default race in a not-so-subtle parallel of real-world whiteness.
In settings where Human and Common are separate languages, though (and I haven’t seen nearly as many of these as I’d like), Common would have developed communally between at least three or four races who needed to communicate all together. With only two races trying to communicate, no one would need to learn more than one new language, but if, say, a marketplace became a trading hub for humans, dwarves, orcs, and elves, then either any given trader would need to learn three new languages to be sure that they could talk to every potential customer, OR a pidgin could spring up around that marketplace that eventually spreads as the traders travel the world.
Drop your concept of Common meaning “english, but in middle earth” for a moment and imagine a language where everyone uses human words for produce, farming, and carpentry; dwarven words for gemstones, masonry, and construction; elven words for textiles, magic, and music; and orcish words for smithing weaponry/armor, and livestock. Imagine that it’s all tied together with a mishmash of grammatical structures where some words conjugate and others don’t, some adjectives go before the noun and some go after, and plurals and tenses vary wildly based on what you’re talking about.
Now try to tell me that’s not infinitely more interesting.
Okay, but like… While I love this, I think you’re putting the cart before the horse!
What if it’s not that humans were cultural imperialists, but rather that “human” is a social construct? Humans are the “default”, the “youngest race”, and often have the most visible genetic diversity. And although only a few races bother to have a name for part-human hybrids, mixed-race romances are attested to in plenty of stories.
So what if “human” is the word for the product of millennia of introgressive hybridization? What if “human” is the word for a genetic “mutt”, someone who’s a smidgen of most races, interbreeding for so long that they’ve become something new?
Or what if Common is taught as a religious language, like Hebrew and Arabic are in our world, and humans just happen to come from the same area where the prophet-bookwriter came from, so they speak the language natively?
Or what if humans are the language-nerds of the universe, the only race that goes around inventing dozens of new languages just for fun? So when there’s a new spell or invention, or when you need to translate a concept, you turn to the nearest human and go “hey, come up with a word for this.”
(This also explains why some spells have great names, and some are damned ridiculous. Like Mr. Tenured Elf Professor is going to do research to double-check his TA’s spell names?)
(”Smith, give me a name for this spell.” “Fuck, I don’t know, it’s fire that’s sorta like an arrow, right? Call it a fire arrow?”)
(Also: WAY too many things end up being dick jokes.)
in our dtd game, which is space fantasy, our gm has declared that ‘common’ is pretty much esperanto. it’s a constructed language designed so every species humans interact with can make/hear its phonemes. old earth languages still exist. murphy the space cowboy also speaks english, chinese, and a little spanish. he can swear in irish gaelic, though his accent is terrible. none of these are ‘common’; common is its own thing.
Seebs, you word good. Can you help me articulate the difference between fiction affecting reality (re: rape culture, beauty standards, “normal”) and fiction clearly separated from reality (re: ships you don’t like, escapism, portrayals of bad things)? There’s definitely middle ground between, say, 50 Shades being awful for its terrible portrayal of BDSM and romanticized abuse and 50 Shades being perfectly fine because adults can understand fiction vs. reality. I just don’t know how to say it.
I see where you got off on the wrong foot. The question is not “when does fiction affect reality” but “how does fiction affect reality”. Fiction always has effects. But if you want to show that a given kind of fiction has bad effects, you have to actually show that the bad effects exist, and are not completely irrelevant compared to the positive effects. And even then, it’s not clear that this would be a basis for doing anything but, say, writing something you like better.
The problem comes from the unconsidered assumption that fiction’s sole effect on reality is to make people think that the things depicted are good. That’s actually not an especially common outcome, especially with things that are tagged for what they contain. (Indeed, those have precisely the opposite effect; I know a lot more people who realized they were being abused because they saw fictional depictions depict the behavior as being bad than people who became convinced that it was okay.
This post finally clicked something into place I’ve been pondering about:
I don’t think 50 Shades of Grey romanticizes abuse at all. Or rather, I think the popularity of 50 Shades of Grey reveals an existing cultural mindset that is blind to a particular way a situation could be abusive. The abuse was already romanticized. The book is a symptom, not a cause.
This is part of why I don’t have any particular problem with the book existing. The problem wouldn’t go away if we somehow vanished the book from all shelves everywhere. That’s a red herring.
But the popularity of the book does motivate me to discuss the problematic material and pick it apart in detail. It does motivate me to advocate hard for more education on topics like consent and healthy negotiation, because apparently there are a whole ton of people out there getting bad information, and hello we have highlighted a need.
And I guarantee that discussions going on around this book have helped people identify bad shit going on in their own lives. If nothing else, by revealing an apparently prolific blindspot, it helped us figure out where discussions needed to be had. It woulda been hella nice if some of those discussions and awareness could have come from the author (proper tagging, anyone?), but they are happening, in places they were not happening before.
Could the book plant dangerous seeds in the uninformed? Hell yes. But the fact that there are people who are uninformed about what healthy relationships and consent look like is not a problem that can be solved by controlling what types of fiction people are allowed to write and read. Because if we as a society are relying on a person’s chance encounters with various popular media to provide a minimally adequate sex education we have already failed.
Like wow.
a note to millennials re: gen-x not entirely freaking the fuck out over trump
it’s not that we don’t think it’s bad shit
it’s just that it’s not NEW bad shit to someone who grew up under reagan and the bushes, exactly; what’s new is how blatant and hamfisted it is, not the actual agenda
also new is the fact that people care and are horrified
also new is the fact that people have anything better to compare it to
so we’re kinda like “aw not this shit again, i thought we were past this” rather than “end of the fucking world” about it, like “welp time to dig up those old dead kennedies albums”
even the nuclear threat is like
idk babies we thought about getting nuked a LOT when i was growing up, it was just this constant cloud following us around, we made nuclear apocalypse jokes and it wasn’t even that dark because it was just life
it’s been nice not thinking about mushroom clouds for a while but it’s not exactly a shock that it’s come back up
i’m not trying to make you feel naive here, i’m just saying history is dark as fuck, and while you maybe knew that intellectually, you’ve been living in a very bright time up until now
i wish you could’ve gone your whole lives without knowing your government doesn’t have a problem with getting everyone killed for no fucking reason except to add another zero to the already absurd bank accounts of a tiny handful of elderly white men, but since shit fell out this way, i guess i just have to let you know that it isn’t something new, it’s the same battle we’ve been fighting all along
anyway, i’ve got your back
this manages to be depressing and reassuring somehow
i have to admit i’ve been feeling a little bit surprised by the anguish, and i chalked it up to my autistic emotional weirdness that makes me not feel stuff all at once, but this is very true. i grew up thinking world war III was about to start at any minute and we’d all be nuked to death. i was waiting to be on the streets for pretty much my entire childhood. i knew how fragile the safety net was, and i knew how many people wished fervently to dissolve it altogether.
powerlessness is the lot of a kid, so i dealt with it, and lived through it, and became numb to it.
i was 21 when 9/11 happened, and i watched America bend over and look pretty for the patriot act. the libraries fought back (i was working at one) but all around me people were buying into right wing fuckery with a zeal i’d never seen before. they were terrified and they were sculpted into bigots by opportunistic fucks in the bush administration. i watched national security get scary like it is today. the TSA, the NSA, homeland security, FUCKING GUANTANAMO BAY, unprecedented pressures on civil liberties being accepted as the price for safety (because we’re so fucking into safety we’ll put ourselves in danger just to feel like we have it)
my dad and mom survived the vietnam war and the broken US welfare system. i was born into the Reagan years. i watched society grapple with the bullshit that was the 2000 election and i was scared but i expected worse any day now, and i lived like that for a long time until it felt normal.
i’m used to being afraid of the right on the rise, i’m comfortable with it
but this administration? this specific regime? fucking terrifies me.
the good news is, we can stop it, and we’re already making history with our resistance.
what’s missing this time, i think, is complacency. the obama generation that hasn’t grown up numb to constant fuckery is fucking pissed, and those of us who learned to live with the monster are starting to acknowledge just how bad it is, and how normal it ain’t.
it’s nice to be inspired, even if it’s angry inspiration. numbness is how you survive, but it’s no way to live.
well said. i feel like the people for whom this is all a fresh outrage are going to keep me from falling back into that numb despair.
just moving along like everyone else 