Interfacing With Humans

Why interfacing with humans is necessary

You’re standing in the kitchen thinking about what to make this evening. You’re flicking through a recipe book full of bright pictures and sequential methods. Recipes are sort of like algorithms, aren’t they? You set up the environment, follow the steps, and outcomes the result. Requiring creativity, precision, methodology, and tastiness, they appeal to our minds as engineers. As you think about algorithms, your mind drifts to when you were first learning to program. It wasn’t a passion that you already held, nor was it one that unfolded in an instant. It unfurled slowly with time. At first, you hated it. It was frustrating. You didn’t understand any of the concepts or familiar building blocks like variables, methods, arguments, and loops, which underpin most programming languages. The compiler spat out incomprehensible error after incomprehensible error as you tinkered.