A Stupidity-Preserving Interface
Googling is one of those things that has so saturated my life that it now seems trivial. How did programmers operate before Google? Images flit before the mind…IRC, books, co-workers…but seriously, for someone who searches hourly, the mind boggles.
If you live with Google for a while, the controversy about the Web’s inclusivity–how can we sift the smart from the dumb?–is useless. When I was a stupid programmer, I found a lot of slightly-less-stupid blog posts, tutorial and articles that spoke to the stupid in me. When I become less stupid, other voices beckoned. The web grows with me.
Lately I’ve been wondering whether the web should preserve even more stupidity. When I really look at the hours I rack up programming, far too many of them are consumed with stupid mistakes, especially when starting fresh on a new kind of task, language or project. Google is still helpful then, but all too often I find myself grinding through some stupidity alone.
This is partly due to the fact that the set of smart, conceptual mistakes is a minor subset of all possible mistakes. “It’s” v. “Its” is downright hi-concept… “accommodate” v. “acommodate”, “accomodate”, “accommadate” is nearly random in comparison. Not even the web can preserve all the permutations of sheer error.