this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2025
538 points (95.6% liked)

Programmer Humor

27248 readers
872 users here now

Welcome to Programmer Humor!

This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!

For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.

Rules

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] backlever@programming.dev 17 points 1 month ago (8 children)

Imagine a chemistry lab tutorial aimed at 9th grade students getting "as a non-chemist, this reads as gibberish" comments from first graders. Nobody would blame the tutorial authors.

People need to start putting in the effort. There is no such thing as learning for free.

[–] Allero@lemmy.today 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

If it's an instruction to a dishwasher liquid, you better write it for first-graders.

Sure, if you write a documentation to some developer tools, use developer language.

But if it's something you expect regular folk to use, think of how much more people could use it if they wouldn't need to learn something entirely out of their field of expertise to use it.

You can make dishwashing liquid kit that would require extensive knowledge in organic chemistry to use. It would be cheap and darn simple to develop. You could release it today! You just...shouldn't.

Remember people have their lives, and shouldn't be forced to comprehend everything around them at a professional level. Many developers seem to forget about it A LOT somehow, shifting it to the user and saying "I'm done here", sitting in the bubble of experts and treating users like stupid rats who can't simply get a computer science degree to use their computer. As a food technologist, I recently developed a premix for home-baking of phenylalanine-free pastry, and 70% of the work was making it idiot-proof. It is true for any field, yet it is important. People can't learn everything every time they need something, and it's not their fault.

[–] SmartmanApps@programming.dev 2 points 1 month ago

use developer language

Microsoft uses Microsoft language, and the only people who understand it are people who have been Microsoft programmers for a long time.

sitting in the bubble of experts

Yep, the Microsoft ecosystem is completely unwelcome to newbies. It's by experts for experts, and everyone else can go to hell

load more comments (6 replies)