Aurynn Shaw

> It is hard to have empathy for a problem you don't have.

I do not find this myself, and it is a standard part of the design of a lot of commercial software: intentionally thinking about disabilities, impairments, and difficulties, and working on accommodating people who struggle with these things.

Examples:

* GUIs that flash the screen to signify a bell sounding for deaf users.

* Keyboard-operated GUIs for users with motor or sensory impairments who can't use pointing devices. (Blind users can't see a mouse pointer so can't use one.)

* UIs with alternate colour schemes for people with colour-blindness.

It has long been a source of irritation for me that FOSS tools are so resisitant to implementing this.

> I have only recently become open to the idea that people might legitimately experience pain using an unfamiliar syntax.

Good gracious. That is a surprise to me.

I love the _idea_ of Lisp and have written about it at length, but I find it, and APL, and many other languages, impenetrable.

For ordinary non-technical people, "algebra" is a synecdoche for "something that is really hard to understand".

Algebraic notation is just about the maximum level of mathematics that many non-specialists can handle. The idea of a letter or symbol standing for any number so that it is possible to reason about arithmetic without specifying the numbers being manipulated is brain-bending for the majority of people.

And yet, this is the sine qua non of programming languages. It's…

I agree with the general sentiment of your comment and I think there are several factors at play here.

* The human brain is not capable of evaluating and re-evaluating every possible option amongst the plethora of technical choices developers are faced with. This forces us to develop certain coarse grained mental heuristics (prejudices and biases) to navigate technology, and even if these broad generalizations are roughly true initially, we tend not to re-evaluate them over time. This leads to stale biases (e.g. some library/language was missing an API 10 years ago, and someone formed an immutable opinion on it).

* These broad generalizations lack nuance. I watched a talk recently by Dan Abramov where he calls these heuristics (I'm paraphrasing) a form of information compression [1]. That compression is lossy — it doesn't preserve the original context in which the heuristic was formed.

* There's also some insecurity at play here too. Developers want to believe that they've chosen The One True Solution, and harshly invalidating the alternatives is one way to reenforce that fantasy.

* And of course, social media has exacerbated this problem by rewarding inflammatory hot takes. You won't get nearly as many views/upvotes/likes for a sober take that says "technology X is well suited for this narrow use case" as you will for a hot take that says "why technology X failed", or "why everyone hates technology X".

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