Can Programming be Emotional?

Why do we experience the dread of using certain tools over others (debugger vs. console.log)? Have you thought about how you feel when programming?

35:31 Omar: Once I kind of started introspecting about like, what am I thinking and feeling when I'm programming and why am I not doing things? I noticed that there were all these weird emotional forces that are really determinative of what I'm doing at any given time.

Henry

@left_pad

here's @rsnous on the dread of using debuggers: "it's not sufficient to just give people a tool that theoretically does the thing. It has to be integrated in the experience in a way that works emotionally"

ref: twitter.com/rsnous/status/

22:30 PM - 05 Oct 2020

Omar Rizwan @rsnous

when I used to TA intro systems programming, kids similarly dreaded using gdb -- they would do almost anything, even if it took way longer and they were completely stuck, to avoid breaking it out

5 18

35:45 Omar: And I originally noticed the debugger thing, I tweeted about this, because I was TAing a class in college with freshmen and sophomores who were learning how to program in C and they hated using the debugger. Like they would do almost anything to avoid, to avoid having to pull up the debugger. And again, it's always tempting to tell them. we did usually tell them, like, why don't you open the debugger? But I think at the same time, there's something to learn from that. Like, why don't people want to use the debugger?

Do emotions matter when we are programming, or is that something we leave at home? Or is it something we should hone in on?

Omar joins me to talk about his time working on Dynamicland, or rather, more the way of thinking about programming that Dynamicland tries to embody.

Maybe you've heard of Bret Victor from famous talks like Inventing on Principle (55min) or Learnable Programming.

It's not just able making coding easier, but making computation a more dynamic medium in the sense of using the real world: space, community, our bodies.

In this 40min podcast we talk through a bunch of Omar's tweets: the tyranny of using a list for every UI, how design can at many terms remove a user's control, materiality of physical books, how tech is seen as discrete features vs. a coherent whole, epistemology and knowing things like people, end user programming, and the importance of understanding our emotions when coding.

Full transcript at https://hopeinsource.com/emotional!

• tweet for discussion