Tuesday, January 14th, 2003

And in one of those weird coincidences, Cafe au Lait has the following java quote for the day, which I'll just reprint because it doesn't have archives for the quotes... (well, it does... but it lumps the whole year on one page...)

"because you can program well or poorly, and because most of it is creative (in that we don't really know what we're doing when we start out), my view is that we should train developers the way we train creative people like poets and artists. People may say,"Well, that sounds really nuts." But what do people do when they're being trained, for example, to get a Master of Fine Arts in poetry? They study great works of poetry. Do we do that in our software engineering disciplines? No. You don't look at the source code for great pieces of software. Or look at the architecture of great pieces of software. You don't look at their design. You don't study the lives of great software designers. So, you don't study the literature of the thing you're trying to build. "

--Richard Gabriel, Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems
Read the rest in The Poetry of Programming

comments (0)   # posted 11:14 am (uct-6)

This is one of the better definitions of art that I have come across:

"Painting is a craft. Interactive design is a craft. Writing is a craft. Art is merely craft applied with conscience and care."

From Greg Costikyan.

For years I've been struggling with the idea.. is programming is an art or not? I've been switching back and forth between yes and no, and I'm still undecided.

comments (0)   # posted 9:41 am (uct-6)