Maslow seems familiar. I can’t remember if I’ve looked at it before. I don’t have notes on it, which makes me believe I haven’t seen it in primary sources. Off the cuff, it seems oversimplified; certain behaviors cut across the hierachy, especially where safety is concerned. And I don’t think aesthetics is really less important than knowledge. But I need to look at the real thing, not secondary simplifications, before I pass more judgment.

I think, in essence, it’s a generational thing. Maybe the Gen Xers grew up with a strong curiousity to how and why things worked…thanks to the simpler things we played with (like building houses out of Legos or busting open a transistor radio). The following generation(s) was thrown a lot of information and data and never forced to interpret it into their own lives. Teachers simply ask them to regurgitate it on demand. Those differences in rearing and education have created strikingly different skill sets for the modern world.

That’s a damn good question. I’ve often wondered that for myself. Knowing what tools you have to make your job easier is a key to getting things done.

Although I’m not qualified to speculate, I wouldn’t be surprised if it has to do with focus. Your students are focused on the task of writing, but have never focused on the task of learning the writing tool. When we compare writing with a text editor (or gods forbid, MS Word) to writing with a pen or pencil, the idea of find-and-replace simply slips out of their mental working set.

This is exactly where a feature like the much maligned Clippy could be incredibly valuable. “I see you’ve just replaced ‘widget’ with ‘sprocket’ again.”, Clippy says, “Would you like me to replace all the other places ‘widget’ appears?” But this would require actual artificial intelligence, because I’m not talking about you hunting through the document to do a find-and-replace yourself. I’m talking about you happening upon ‘widget’ and changing it to ‘sprocket’ then 10 minutes later, happening upon another ‘widget’ and again changing it to ‘sprocket’.

That’s a hard task.

Wall doesn’t advocate writing a script for every problem, though admittedly he often acts as if that is his argument. And when I patch together code from my .history when a problem reappears, I sometimes wonder if it would make sense to generalize everything!

However, that’s a little beside the point. I think Dan is correct to steer us back to context and awareness. Really, cluelessness is less relevant than curiosity, willingness and/or ability to improvise, and willingness to experiment. To cast it in comprhet terms, willingness to play Elbow’s “doubting/believing game.” Ignorance just isn’t that important: yeah, it can help ensure that somebody approaches a problem without jumping to conclusions. But I have a hard time believing my students are unaware of find and replace. Rather, they just aren’t motivated to learn how it works. Why?

Humans should not have to become like computers to use them.

Actually, I’ve always suspected Wall’s “lazy programmer” bit was just a more polite way of describing a fuck-about programmer. I’d fire any programmer who worked for me that exhibited this behaviour. Well, maybe fire is too strong a word… But there’d be tremendous pressure for that tool to pay off.

I’d *much* rather buy a good tool (like BBEdit) that makes doing the work easier (seconds instead of minutes) to investing an hour on the mere speculation that I’ll need this tool again. The opportunity cost is just too great.