Ask HN: Is there an art of computing, which can not be put into words?
I am wondering if there is some hidden style&#x2F;art in computing. Something that can not be (easily) teached.<p>Some fellow postgraduate (master) computer science students, which have fairly good grades, really struggle with basic computing stuff. This is hard for me to explain but here are some situations:<p>We had to do a group project using kubernetes. One group member (3 members, me, a friend and him) uses as OS windows. One would think a postgraduate student would be able to set this up fairly quickly. But he was not able to set this up.
We used a Makefile to deploy all services. So while I helped him set everything up it showed that this guy does not know how to use WSL and Makefiles. And does not know linux command line basic, like package managers and basic shell commands.<p>How is it possible that a postgraduate computer science student can not do this by himself? Can a software engineer even be a good software engineer if he doesn’t know the Linux command line basic?<p>Another example: In multiple group projects most team members just want to use Java. Java for everything. If e.g. I suggest Go&#x2F;Rust. They say they do not know it and it is too hard to learn it. They learned java in uni and thats what they will use.<p>I really love to learn new tech. And I generally strive for the simplest solution possible.<p>Why are most so focused on the things they already know, and not at all open for new things?<p>Another example: I’ve met so many students which do not know git CLI. They rather use git GUI tools and always commit more files then they should.<p>I consider a clean beautiful git repo as something nice. Something worth striving for.<p>I do not know how to feel about that. I generally think these students I talk about have better or at least good grades as me in most courses. Still I consider their style of programming and using computers as bad.<p>I personally I am an Arch Linux, vim, tmux, tiling window manger, „I do as much as possible the command line“ kinda guy. I totally get if people do not be like that. However I have of course other students friends which have similar computing setups (use vim, tiling wm, ….). And interestingly they have soo much the same mindset as me. They are open for new programming languages, they try to find the simplest solution, focus on keeping a clean repository, and so on.<p>Above I have just listed some example situations where I got that feeling. The feeling that even though they got good grades still something is off.<p>This makes me wonder it there is some hidden style&#x2F;art of computing which can not be easily teached? Or in other words an art of computing which can not be easily put into words?<p>Did anyone of you have similar experiences you would like share?