Read the Humanities

For example, Ludwig Wittgenstein makes a very good case in the Philosophical Investigations (and elsewhere) that any language we use to speak to one another is not, cannot be, a serialization format for getting a thought or idea or picture out of one person’s head and into another’s. Already we should be on our guard against misunderstanding when we “gather requirements.” Wittgenstein also shows that our ability to understand one another at all does not arise from shared definitions, it arises from a shared experience, from a form of life. This may be one reason why programmers who are steeped in their problem domain tend to do better than those who stand apart from it.

Martin Heidegger studied closely the ways that people experience tools. Programmers build and use tools, we think about and create and modify and recreate tools. Tools are objects of interest to us. But for its users, as Heiddeger shows in Being and Time, a tool becomes an invisible thing understood only in use. For users tools only become objects of interest when they don’t work. This difference in emphasis is worth bearing in mind whenever usability is under discussion.

by Keith Braithwaite