>_Words are a source of misunderstandings._ >_-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince_ > _The point of \[the story\] is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance._ > _-David Foster Wallace, This is Water._ --- Affordance. (noun). - The quality or property of an object that defines its possible uses or makes clear how it can or should be used. This is how psychologists and other non-developers say "method call on an object," where the object is a thing like a banana or a chair. Implicit Affordance. (noun). - Any attribute of an object or experience that is difficult to compile into words, and which is therefore rarely or never considered in verbal descriptions or contexts that require explicit justification, due to the limitations of natural language as a medium for encoding thought. Snowman Imagining Summer. (noun) - A software vulnerability in the human mind arising from the tendency to conflate a thing with its description. This occurs when `thing.description` makes us feel good, so we imagine our life will be better if it involves more `thing`. --- Bug in Human Life: Communication is possible only when words spoken by one mouth trigger a similar thought in another mind. In highly technical areas of life, or other areas where the governing principles are not universally understandable by reference to our shared human nature, spoken words will not bridge the gap between minds unless the speaker and the listener can rely on a set of shared experiences. For non-builtin parts of life, therefore, words will fail us more than usual. In such areas the largest contributor to our experiences of a thing will be its implicit afforances, the attributes which do not lend themselves well to expression in words unless certain experiences are shared. In all such cases, verbal planning is toxic and should be avoided at all costs, especially verbal planning by non-technical management, since non-technical management by definition does not share the necessary experiences to allow communication to be bootstrapped. This is why developers often find that the majority of the features that make code pleasant or unpleasant to use are its implicit affordances. In other words, code we ourselves wrote often surprises us _after_ we wrote it, in terms of its easy or difficulty of use. The same is true of the features that cause a team of developers to cohere socially, to be productive, and feel intrinsically motivated. Since a developer's job is highly technical, communication is only possible by reference to shared experiences. These experiences can be shared pairwise or as a group, but communication is effectively impossible until a bedrock of shared experience exists. See: [[Eat your own Dogfood]] See: [[Planning is Pretending]]