No because the bottleneck is in how fast the interpreter talks to them. How fast the audio plays back the code, and I don't care if you're rain man, having to memorize that much stuff is a huge setback. This is one of those things where everyone knows he's not as efficient as other programmers, but nobody wants to say that because it isn't politically correct. Google still gets some kind of tax benefit for hiring him, and he's not fucking anything up so there's good reasons to keep him.
But do not sit here and tell me a blind person is a better programmer than someone who can see. You're just too afraid to say something that might insult someone else.
Dude, I have no issues calling a spade a spade, or recognizing that the kid in a wheelchair is never going to be an astronaut. But if you actually look at the speed of the TTS some blind programmers use, it's basically at the same speed most programmers read code at. You've still got the disadvantage of needing more short term memory, but that's about it, and it's partially mitigated by the speed of the TTS.
Now, you take a random programmer, make them blind, they're going to be pretty slow. But that's where the selection bias kicks in - anyone who persists with programming despite the difficulty of being unable to see is going to be pretty passionate about it, and as a result of this I'd expect the average blind programmer to be faster and expend more effort improving their ability than the average programmer.
There's a pretty good video here which should give you some idea of how blind programmers actually write code.
8 comments
4 u/Codewow 18 Aug 2015 02:51
I can barely program with eyesight.. >_>
2 u/User_5X22_Dawn 18 Aug 2015 04:30
I would imagine slowly and rarely.
2 u/rdnetto 18 Aug 2015 14:14
You would be wrong. Selection bias means that the few blind programmers are crazy fast.
1 u/User_5X22_Dawn 18 Aug 2015 23:43
No because the bottleneck is in how fast the interpreter talks to them. How fast the audio plays back the code, and I don't care if you're rain man, having to memorize that much stuff is a huge setback. This is one of those things where everyone knows he's not as efficient as other programmers, but nobody wants to say that because it isn't politically correct. Google still gets some kind of tax benefit for hiring him, and he's not fucking anything up so there's good reasons to keep him.
But do not sit here and tell me a blind person is a better programmer than someone who can see. You're just too afraid to say something that might insult someone else.
1 u/rdnetto 19 Aug 2015 09:54
Dude, I have no issues calling a spade a spade, or recognizing that the kid in a wheelchair is never going to be an astronaut. But if you actually look at the speed of the TTS some blind programmers use, it's basically at the same speed most programmers read code at. You've still got the disadvantage of needing more short term memory, but that's about it, and it's partially mitigated by the speed of the TTS.
Now, you take a random programmer, make them blind, they're going to be pretty slow. But that's where the selection bias kicks in - anyone who persists with programming despite the difficulty of being unable to see is going to be pretty passionate about it, and as a result of this I'd expect the average blind programmer to be faster and expend more effort improving their ability than the average programmer.
There's a pretty good video here which should give you some idea of how blind programmers actually write code.
1 u/thelordofcheese 18 Aug 2015 05:59
They work at Microsoft.
1 u/sdkfj239euqo 18 Aug 2015 06:05
The guy in the article works at Google.
0 u/jordan042 18 Aug 2015 03:08
They have an enhanced sense of misplaced semicolons.