䷿ Taking Our Jobs

My father is a software developer, operating systems engineer. He was at Bell Labs during its hayday. I remember the Christmas parties also beer and brats in Boulder. With Claude Code, he started on a fresh microkernel for a new processor type:

Having worked on it for 40 years being an expert at this exact sort of thing, I’m still learning from Claude.

And the other day, he made a maze exploring program for his Vision Pro. He’s never done 3D graphics before, let alone VR. Learning something new at 72. Living as a cybernetic centaur: man’s wisdom atop mechanical legwork.

I’ve been learning in my own way, more meta-learning. After describing the work to my wife, she asked:

Wait, you’re using feelings to program the computer now?

I replied:

I’ve always used feelings, I’m just using English and psychology now instead of Ruby and data-structures. Feeling got me into Ruby in the first place.

Not an accident. Matz made feeling his focus.

Instead of emphasizing the what, I want to emphasize the how part: how we feel while programming. That’s Ruby’s main difference from other language designs. I emphasize the feeling, in particular, how I feel using Ruby. I didn’t work hard to make Ruby perfect for everyone, because you feel differently from me. No language can be perfect for everyone. I tried to make Ruby perfect for me, but maybe it’s not perfect for you.

Pretty perfect. I wonder whether shared culture helped. I’ve certainly found my Feeling of Computing people now.

Software development is odd among creative jobs. Suppose whenever you wanted to direct a play, you also used the same skillset to redo the seats, the airconditioning, the foyer, and you might as well rebuild the whole venue from scratch because it will be faster than trying to reuse bits from last time. Poor boundries and a lot of accidential complexity.