Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers
Literally everything I write is in Markdown because it’s so simple to me. I use it for blogposts, presentations, documentation, todos, internet comments.<p>But this article doesn’t strike a chord with me. The author fails to understand that it seems easy to us because we’re familiar with it. Of course we know how to transform it into PDF or HTML. But this knowledge isn’t basic, and it’s understandable that people want to stick to what they know.<p>Here’s an example. Say you had 10000 rows of CSV to slice and dice and extract insights and visualisations out of. All of us would go to the tools we’re familiar with - pandas, R, duckDB etc. But I think the median Excel user probably completes this task quicker and better than the median pandas user. And then if the pandas person is told “oh, just pick up Excel, it’s easy to learn and so useful” they won’t listen. And for good reason! Excel is powerful, but it’s not easy to learn. It only seems that way to people <i>who already know how it works</i>.<p>Don’t confuse the familiar with easy. Just because it’s easy for you doesn’t mean it’s objectively easy.