Funny coding behaviors

Posted March 10, 2009 12:25 pm
Filed under: Articles by Paul, Writing

Disclaimer: this is just a silly little note, perhaps the first such on this site although my personal site primarily consists of such little tidbits, mostly about my kids.

A few years ago I was working as a developer for a computer training department at a large midwestern university *. I also wrote and taught training courses for them. As jobs tend to do, the work was often in cycles — sometimes I’d spend a few months doing mostly coding, then perhaps I’d be working on a new workshop so I’d spend most of my time writing for a few months.

At one point I was in the transition phase, moving off of a “coding” cycle and into a “writing” cycle. One day while I was writing (in Adobe Framemaker — the word processor we used) I realized that each time I reached the end of a sentence my first instinct was to type a semicolon rather than a period. Too many lines of code written, I guess!

Anyway, I was reminded of that today when something kind of similar took place. Nowadays of course most of my writing, whether code or documentation, is done on a computer. In fact it’s fairly common that when I reach a stopping place while writing in a web browser (such as editing a wiki page) I instinctively type Ctrl+S to “save” (even though that just opens up a dialog to save the HTML of the page, rather than actually saving my work in the wiki or whatever. Today, however, this instinctual behavior was taken to a new level.

I was in a meeting and I had a thought about something I’ve been brainstorming since yesterday. It’s a new project I’m starting on (a documentation architecture project, not a coding one) so I’ve started by just jotting down thoughts in a notebook as they occur to me. I pulled out my notebook and wrote down my ideas. Then I felt a sort of funny twitching in my left hand — my left pinky and middle finger were instinctively trying to perform some sort of repetitive action, and couldn’t quite figure out whether it was appropriate or not. I realized that since I had just finished writing down a thought, my hand was trying to make the gesture for Ctrl+S in an attempt to “save” my “document”. Because of this my brain was momentarily confused — like it somehow knew this action didn’t quite fit in this context (pen and paper) but couldn’t figure out exactly why that was the case. Since of course, mentally I knew I needed to hurry and save my work so that it wasn’t lost.

Anyway, that’s my funny story for the day. Probably for the rest of my life, at least in terms of publishing at this url. So I hope you enjoyed it =)

* Note

My use of the term “large midwestern university” is also an attempt at humor — its an academic inside joke. I went to graduate school at Indiana University (the same “large midwestern university” where I later worked) and we students often read academic papers published by our professors or their former students. In the spirit of anonymity, when they described the participants in their research studies they never described their study participants as “students at Indiana University” or something like that. Instead they always described them as “students at a large midwestern university” although the authors’ biographies would always indicate their affiliation with Indiana University, so there really wasn’t any anonymity about it at all.

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5 Comments so far

March 11th, 2009 at 6:42 am
Darrius is reported to have said:

For the funny coding behaviors, don’t matter just reformat your brain, reinstall the wholle thing and it should be ok : )
March 12th, 2009 at 10:50 am
Ian is reported to have said:

I’ve had nearly identical experiences. I was working on an exam the other day in my calculus class and noticed that I had copied an equation from the problem I was working on incorrectly. My left hand instinctively went through the motions of “command + z”
March 12th, 2009 at 11:10 pm
Sebastian is reported to have said:

Funny story :) I can relate to that and to the commenter above me. When i was a design student we used to do quite a bit of painting and drawing. Me and some of my fellow students had the same funny twitching to “press” Ctrl-Z when a brush or pen stroke on paper didn’t work out as it should have.
Our brains are really fascinating machines :)

sebastian
March 13th, 2009 at 12:47 am
Freddy is reported to have said:

nice to know there are some more guys with keyboard shortcuts deeply stuck in the brain heeehe

I tried to use it on a typo error in the morning newspaper, seems like my brain was thinking “hey, there is something wrong , undo it!”

and that can only mean one thing: too much time on the computer :)
April 6th, 2009 at 7:35 am
polyGeek is reported to have said:

While working from home on a project I took a break and went upstairs to get some food and let stretch my legs. I walked out onto our deck which has a view of mountains and a lake in the valley below. It had just rained that morning and the clouds had now moved off so the air was crystal clear and bright. My first thought was, “wow, this is a very high resolution picture.” And then it hit me that I wasn’t looking at a monitor.