Unused tools (and skills) get rusty and fall apart

I was having an interesting twitter conversation a few days ago. The tweet that started it all claims that most male programmers don’t have beautiful, or even readable handwritings. And in my experience this is true. But I think there is a reason that runs deeper than a given social group having bad handwriting. I also haven’t met a physician that has a readable handwriting either.

In the case of physicians, if you have maybe read Thank You For Arguing, you will realise that it is their code grooming in effect, or their insider language, used to effectively differentiate themselves from others.

Although some programmers can be vain, I don’t think code grooming is the case here, because there is a deeper problem emerging that we were probably the first ones to experience. Handwriting has become obsolete, marked for removal in the next major version, we are following semantic versioning, right? But without joking, If I just take a look at myself, I
almost stopped writing by hand more than 10 years ago. Apart from the few months when I went to finish my bachelor’s degree, I haven’t used it since. I do write some things down on paper, and lately I’ve been using paper and pencil more and more, to sketch, and write down meeting notes. But that doesn’t solve the problem, the real problem. I have a (tough learned) skill, that I’m not using, not on a daily basis, but sometimes a whole month or more could go
by, without me picking up the pen and writing something down. And without use, that, in the past really valuable skill, is fading away. You will never completely forget the skill, but your confidence to use it will fade away with the idle time.

One more skill that I can think about is using a language. I have learned two foreign languages during my education (not counting Latin). And because of weird stream of events, my knowledge of German was better for the 4 years I learned it in elementary school. We had a really great teacher, and she made us talk in German, at least those 2 hours in school each week. Our English teacher, let’s just say she wasn’t as good. Everything changed in high school,
and the tables have turned. The situation with teachers wasn’t really bright way back then, so we got an unqualified German teacher, and over those four years, I’ve lost most of the knowledge. Not using it 14 years after I finished high school, I can still understand most of it, but can’t communicate to save my life. Our English teacher on the other hand, was a posh old lady, who knew how to teach. And I’ll be thankful to her for the rest of my life, because not
only did she try (and succeed) teaching us English, but she also tried (and somewhat succeeded) teaching us good manners, which is also a skill hardly gained, and easily lost. My father picked up a Russian hitchhiker this summer, while he was doing some work. And as he has learned Russian in school (we were behind the iron curtain then), he knew at least the basics. Not much, but could understand the guy, and luckily our languages are similar enough, so the Russian guy could understand him back in his pigeon Russian. I asked him how he felt speaking Russian for the first time in almost 40 years, and the answer was, I was afraid I would say something wrong, and offend the man, while I tried to help him.

It’s the same fear that I have when filling out some forms, and have to write anything down by hand. I delegated most of it till now, just because my vanity doesn’t allow me to show that I’m becoming more illiterate with each passing day. That is the reason I added learning Calligraphy to my bucket list. I just can’t allow that skill to fade away so easily. Also, as irony in life dictates, I’m in the great position to relearn German, and to even use it daily, so I’m going to grab that opportunity too. As you can never know too much, except for this guy here, you should commit to lifelong learning. And try to use all of your skills, as much as you can, you never know when you will pick up someone needing a ride, but he only speaks the language you learned in school 40 years ago.

Also, go and read Merlin’s Blog, you might find interesting and useful things there.