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James_Miller comments on Programming-like activities? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Dating
You cannot date independently. Dating requires at least one other person. One of the amazing things about programming is that I can sit down anywhere at any time and create. Computers are handy, but even pencil and paper will do in a pinch.
They have online dating now. Yuo can prety much do this at any time you can do programming.
I'm an economist not a programmer, but shouldn't the goal of programming be to write code that other people value? Also, you do need other people to program, the people who build the hardware, operate the power system, grow your food..., it's just that with extremely high probability you can count on them being there for you.
What you say is absolutely true on a large scale.
When I say that programming is a very "independent" activity, what I'm trying to describe is the fact that at any time, I can think to myself, "I want do some programming", and within 30 seconds, be doing some programming. In particular, I don't have to call someone, convince them that "no, this will be fun", fail, try convincing someone else, succeed, wait for them to head over, etc. etc., by which point my impulse to do some programming has completely disappeared.
You might be surprised how much of a difference this makes, especially for an INTJ like me ;-)
You can program to solve your own problems. It's very likely that other people have similar or identical problems, so your code can benefit them even if you didn't plan for that.
I guess the major difference would be that dating doesn't give you rapid feedback.
It does if you interpret James's comment to mean interactions with romantic intent.
Dating a single person for a long time is akin to managing a team of developers (sure, you don't get quick feedback) and chatting to someone you don't know in a book store is like quickly compiling something in a new language.
That... definitely explains my failure at "dating a single person for a long time" and my (relative) success at "chatting to someone you don't know".
Well, it might not really count as useful feedback if you just get a segmentation fault without any explanation what went wrong.