Love4Boobies wrote:
Perhaps I'm wrong about this but I remain unconvinced that it has to do with any of the things you've mentioned because people are usually quite comfortable dealing with huge amounts of incomplete information in their regular lives.
In our "regular lives" we don't have to be exactly precise in like a hundred of subsequent actions. Our movements are approximate, but we still make it from point A to point B. Our judgement (including risk assessment) is often quite sloppy too, but we can still live and multiply all the while doing silly things and believing strange things. Wrong change at the store? Thinking a person is (being) mean if they don't smile at you or chitchat with you? Imprecision and mistakes here usually don't cause grave immediate problems. And often times you can interact with other people to get issues resolved. Here, OTOH, you can't plead, incentivize or threaten the CPU to run your code to your satisfaction. You need to talk to it by the book. With precision. Step by step for hundreds of steps. And the book is big and boring. And it has a number of mistakes and ambiguities here and there and you have to make sense of it. Every little thing you ignore because you think you know it or you think it's unimportant, while in reality it's the other way around, every little thing like that may be the very reason why the CPU is "acting up".
Love4Boobies wrote:
The one exception to this is the dry way in which technical documentation is written but, on the other hand, it seems a lot simpler to interpret a text whose meaning is literal than to extract meaning from a great novel. It seems to me that the only time people get truly lost is when they are on unfamiliar territory.
But maybe you're right. Maybe both of us are right. If you make the circle noting that people turn to other people with their programming problems and eventually figure stuff out, become comfortable and skilled...