I feel like I’m hearing disappointment from you directed at people who could have done better.
I don’t feel that disappointment, and also I don’t think they could have done better.
I have experienced something that takes a similar shape—probably less often than you do, probably less cuttingly toward my own self-image than you experience it—because I have met a certain category of generalizations often enough to can “I guess I’m nobody, then” as my default reply to them. Sometimes people cringe and sometimes they laugh, depending on the context and how the line is delivered.
Some people can’t see some things. To most of the world, good code looks identically esoteric to bad code. To me, a poorly executed sports play looks indistinguishable from a well-executed one. A non-coder could infer the difference between good and bad code by watching an expert read each; I could infer the difference between a good play and a bad one by listening to the crowd’s response.
The feelings I hear in this would make sense to me if they came from someone who imagined that others were doing some special favor for everyone else and withholding it from them. That’s how the phenomenon can look, from a certain perspective. But the way I model it in my own experiences, others are giving the same treatment to everybody. They’re modeling everyone around them in these small, simplistic models, and if the model predicts the subject accurately, it looks like the subject was “really seen”. If the subject is larger or more nuanced than the model can hold, the subject seems “ignored”.
Maybe your world extends far enough beyond those of observers, in certain directions, that there’s a lot of you that they really can’t see. To be egalitarian and avoid causing offense, we could tack on an argument about how there are probably nuances to them that you can’t see either, but realistically it’s rather rude to pretend that those should matter to anyone as that person matters to themself.
If somebody can’t grasp the meaning of a function no matter how carefully it’s explained to them, if they tell the function that it doesn’t exist in the way that it’s defined to… Yes, and?
I feel like I’m hearing disappointment from you directed at people who could have done better.
I don’t feel that disappointment, and also I don’t think they could have done better.
I have experienced something that takes a similar shape—probably less often than you do, probably less cuttingly toward my own self-image than you experience it—because I have met a certain category of generalizations often enough to can “I guess I’m nobody, then” as my default reply to them. Sometimes people cringe and sometimes they laugh, depending on the context and how the line is delivered.
Some people can’t see some things. To most of the world, good code looks identically esoteric to bad code. To me, a poorly executed sports play looks indistinguishable from a well-executed one. A non-coder could infer the difference between good and bad code by watching an expert read each; I could infer the difference between a good play and a bad one by listening to the crowd’s response.
The feelings I hear in this would make sense to me if they came from someone who imagined that others were doing some special favor for everyone else and withholding it from them. That’s how the phenomenon can look, from a certain perspective. But the way I model it in my own experiences, others are giving the same treatment to everybody. They’re modeling everyone around them in these small, simplistic models, and if the model predicts the subject accurately, it looks like the subject was “really seen”. If the subject is larger or more nuanced than the model can hold, the subject seems “ignored”.
Maybe your world extends far enough beyond those of observers, in certain directions, that there’s a lot of you that they really can’t see. To be egalitarian and avoid causing offense, we could tack on an argument about how there are probably nuances to them that you can’t see either, but realistically it’s rather rude to pretend that those should matter to anyone as that person matters to themself.
If somebody can’t grasp the meaning of a function no matter how carefully it’s explained to them, if they tell the function that it doesn’t exist in the way that it’s defined to… Yes, and?