Describing a lawyer as an "intuitivist" is pretty hilarious. Their work, especially surrounding contract work, can be extremely programming like, with very particular language, highly technical and specific terms/wording, and there absolutely are many cases where typing one thing wrong (such as a misplaced comma) can (and has[1]) completely change the meaning of crucial sections of contracts.
Obviously I can't know about what every profession does, not even my own. But I've interacted with enough professionals of various sorts to say I don't think the intricacy is the same.
It is. Before becoming a sysadmin I was a lawyer for 12 years. Never had trouble with interruptions while on my feet in court (except for my adversary, or the judge), but it was a real problem when drafting contracts or auditing complex estate accounts. Sure, you could multitask easily in a real estate closing or a trial settlement conference. But a lot of the work required shutting the private office door and asking the staff to "hold all calls". To be fair, sysadmin work was a lot less stressful and more rewarding -- except when it came time to write or debug code. That, and troubleshooting WebLogic services, Apache threads, the network team's firewall rules or database performance.
The real problem is that, culturally, most people aren't ready to accept software development as a high wire, professional, activity. That still would disturb this fantasy they have about tech being "intuitive" or managable in any meaningful way for non-experts. Those of us on the inside know that's b.s.
type one thing wrong and my code is still code, but the meaning changes, just like the meaning in the novel changes.
with many novels, the author may have intended X, but readers are often encouraged to bring their own views and interpretations to the work, and those may often be useful to others in understanding the work. that's not as true for most software I've worked on though.
And when I mentioned writers, I was thinking of the work that's probably required to build the plot, even before writing it. I'm not a writer, but I would imagine it involves holding a world and timeline in their head and tweak it while making sure they're not introducing plot-holes. I imagine quite a bit of research is involved, too.
As if programming can't involve intuition. There isn't one way to do things nor do we operate with strictly defined rules to follow. We need a fair amount of intuition from experience to make the decisions that will be more beneficial for the future development of our projects.
The point is others tend to rely more on intuitive structures that are everyday. Crystallised intuition about a specific domain doesn't count because of course everyone who is a specialist is going to have their own local knowledge. Calling it domain intuition might make more sense.
What kind of intuition do they rely so much on to call them intuitionists that is everyday in nature rather particular to their domain, but that programmers don't also rely on? Are we talking "everyday" like "I need to buy groceries" type of intuition? I don't understand what you're trying to say.