<i>>>"Damn it! I'm a human, not a boolean condition!" I'd declare, clearly emotionally compromised.</i><p>This will probably be an unpopular comment on HN, but I think there are a lot of vulcans[1] in the tech scene that would be more socially amiable & better understand others if they stopped trying to exclusively use cold-logic on people and understood that emotions are just as important as logic when dealing with humans.<p><i>"All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness."</i> - Tennessee Williams<p><i>"Honesty without Compassion is Cruelty</i>"
<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140121033617-36792-honesty-without-compassion-is-cruelty" rel="nofollow">https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140121033617-3...</a><p>1. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_(Star_Trek)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_(Star_Trek)</a>
I missed the part where she hacked her husband's addiction ... what I heard is that she went from being an enabler to a co-junkie.<p>On the other hand, my wife has said some of the same things about me. She doesn't complain when I bring home a paycheck though, and she really does help me stay "balanced enough".
I'm glad the author was open minded enough to try it herself and stop judging. The other women she mentions sound like monsters who are unsupportive of their husbands. If they were writing a book, I doubt anyone would make a big deal of it, let alone write an article about it. I'd expect the wives to be supportive or leave. Programming might be addictive, but it is productive. It's a far cry from drinking or using drugs. Instead of trying to stop their spouses, perhaps programmers' significant others should learn to embrace their spouses' work just as one might try to embrace and support a writer they were married to.<p>To compare programming to drug addiction is unfair to both programmers and addicts.
That's... Not really what an addiction is. And someone hiding my computer from me because they've decided they don't like me programming? Well, that's just odd...<p>All in all though, a decent motivational story -- although I wonder whether it's a good thing for everyone to know enough programming to be dangerous: I certainly wrecked our home computer a number of times while learning as a kid ;)
"I often see the effects of coding manifest in his daily habits and tasks: the way he meticulously organizes his sock drawer and how he does the dishes using the least amount of water and soap yet somehow achieves the highest level of cleanliness."<p>"I commiserated with other women -- girlfriends and wives of computer programmers who told me how their partners often forgot to eat, drink or go to the bathroom."<p>I'm sorry lady, you're not married to a programmer, you're married to a robot.<p>"The task was to build a website in six hours. We were guided through the basic concepts of HTML and CSS during two morning lectures led by teachers from Vancouver's Lighthouse Labs, then we were let loose to start creating our own projects."<p>"Organizers told me 60 per cent of the participants at the HTML500 were women. Everyone had different reasons for choosing to spend their Saturday learning computer science:"<p>Ah yes, the well-known computer science fields of HTML and CSS. Those aren't even programming languages!
This looks like spam for learning to code dressed up as some kind of supposedly true anecdote. One of these husbands is believable, but an entire cluster?
Okay now, please be nice, she is really trying :) Sounds like PhasmaFelis is the only one on this thread who got the point.<p>I think most of you here really enjoy what you do for a living. I can't be certain, but I'd venture to guess that the tech industry scores the highest when it comes to the happiness factor.<p>As for me personally -- having come from investment banking and consulting -- it was the best choice I made for my career and personal sanity. It was clear to my wife how much happier I had become -- not working for some faceless corporation and actually contributing tangible value to society.<p>Journalism is a noble, but unfortunately, a declining field. It is stagnant. There isn't much funding [1]. I have been urging her to get involved with the vibrant tech community, which she has been. When I told her that I was volunteering at the HTML 500, she jumped at the opportunity -- and blogged about it :) yes yes.. HTML is not <i>real</i> programming (even though it is probably the single technology that touches most people's lives) and yes, Lisp does not have semicolons, but Javascript does, so there.<p>By the sounds of it, she seems to have finally garnered the curiosity and drive to dive deeper in the rabbit hole. At least to give it a try, it might not be for her, but she will understand me better. This kind of behaviour should be condoned.<p>It is also her first time on Hacker News, so we should show her how great a community this is (and that we are <i>not</i> a bunch of pedants)!<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5324429" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5324429</a><p>Edit: Now why did this post get penalized and bumped all the way to the third page, where it was sitting in the Top 10 just 30 min ago?
<i>Computer engineers go by a number of different stage names: they are software developers, programmers, coders, hackers.</i><p>Computer engineering is an umbrella term, although it's usually implied that they have an above-average understanding of hardware. It's not a synonym for programmer.<p><i>Marc's mind was a symphony of brackets, tags, semi-colons and logic operators. To me, it was just noise.</i><p>Yet at the end she mentioned him specifically writing in Ruby (Rails) and Common Lisp.<p>Otherwise, it was a decent sentimental story. I'm not particularly a fan of emotionally manipulative glurge and I can't help but smirk at the whole "learn to code = write markup" equivocation and the general try-hard tone, but it was okay. I can see it being motivating.
"When we disagree on something, for example, he always presents the most goddamned rational arguments laying them out in an obnoxiously coherent and systematic way."<p>If politicians did this, the world would be a much better place.
Loathsome pop-psych, loathsome relationship pattern ... and redeemed by turning it on its head. Well played. Had me hate-reading in the middle and happy by the end.
'How I stopped my husband making money so he could give me more attention, in-turn creating the perfect future argument that we don't make enough money'
Programmers know nothing of logic. This article is a fabricated advert like most of HuffPo's content.<p>A true programming addict would even bother with the dishes.<p>Now Yahoo pay attention! if you could only insult the average persons intelligence while selling ads that look like content! (oh wait)