I'm trying to rebuild an old-ish (and rather banged-up) personal computer with a new operating system. Because, you know, friends don't let friends use Vista. [insert trollface]
So far, it's Gremlins: 4, Me: 0. (I've had to break out the paperclip--'nuff said.) I'm starting to sympathise a bit with the sub-species of programmer who despises hardware. In my case, I was less than amused to learn to realise that sometimes, the System Administrator has to deal with their own version of "syntactic sugar."
For non-coders, "syntactic sugar" is a shortcut in a programming language that has counter-intuitive (at least to a newbie) results or side-effects. In the worst-case scenario, "it just works" despite seeming to miss critical input or function invocations.
Other coders--including my betters--will disagree, but I generally dislike that in a language. It jacks up the slope in the learning curve, in my less-than-humble-opinion. Arthur C. Clarke aside, the magic of "it just works" is antithetical to the scientific reasoning process that's supposed to govern computer programming (and debugging).
Outside of the coding sphere, I tripped over something suspiciously similar. My Debian installation DVD didn't include a hardware driver compatible with the USB wifi stick I was using. Fortunately, I was able to find them on the Debian website and copy them to a flash drive. I plugged the drive into the back of the PC and continued. From that point on, I had wireless access.
Convenient, right? To me, it was actually kind of creepy. First off, the installer never asked me to specify the location of the wifi driver. Secondly, the driver was just one of many files bundled into a larger .DEB archive.
Magic.
Ugh.
I realise that there are times--particularly when it's not part of your core competency and the SysAdmin has already left for the day/week--when "stuff just working" is a good thing. But it's unlikely that this is the last time this particular PC and I will tussle. In which case "magic," however convenient, may actually be counter-productive in the long run.
That and I flatter myself that a programmer who isn't interested in pulling back the curtain on the controls is no programmer at all.
