by Ed Hartnett
Who Needs a Fancy-Schmancy HTML Editor?
My 8-year-old niece asked me a difficult question. Upon being told that I was a computer programmer, she asked, "But what do you do all day?"
I tried to explain it to her, but from her incredulous look, I gathered that she didn't quite believe me. The adults around the room laughed, but I'm not sure any of them had a better understanding of the process. They were just more used to the ridiculous idea of paying a grown man to sit and play with a computer all day.
What Do Programmers Do All Day?
Programming is mostly about editing text files, and that is as true for the fancy graphical Web site as it is for the most boring, old application that doesn't even have a graphical user interface.
That is, instead of pushing pretty buttons, most programmers just type and type and type, without once touching the mouse.
I love movies like Jurassic Park, where they show a fat, sloppy, obnoxious programmer with his computer screen in the background. Such scenes look totally fake to me, not because I've never known fat, sloppy, obnoxious programmers, but because the screen in the background had a lot of fancy graphics—even a dancing hula girl at one point!
What geek ever does graphics? When I'm programming, the screen is just white text on a black background, and the mouse might as well be disconnected from the machine. And nothing ever dances or blinks. It just sits there, a bunch of letters on the screen.
