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The Poetry Of Programming
Lumpish Scholar writes "Sun's Richard Gabriel (possibly the only person with both a Ph.D. in computer science and an MFA in poetry) talks about "the connections between creativity, software, and poetry": "People say, 'Well, how come we can't build software the way we build bridges?' The answer is that we've been building bridges for thousands of years, and while we can make incremental improvements to bridges, the fact is that every bridge is like some other bridge that's been built.... But in software ... we're rolling out -- if not the first -- at most the seventh or eighth version. We've only been building software for 50 years, and almost every time we're creating something new.""
The problems people face have barely changed in thousands of years. The problems that business (which uses 95% of the software out there) faces haven't changed in 200 years. The requirements are well-known. The solutions exist. The reason the software sucks isn't that you have a PHB, it's that you lack discipline to find and fix all your bugs.
Are we really creating something new each time, or creating things in parallel? I'm not an advanced programmer by any means but I've taken a few classes and noticed that the typical approach is to have students recreate solutions to common problems for the purposes of learning (e.g. The Towers of Hanoi to learn recursion), are we enculturating ourselves to go it alone rather than look at what others have done before us?
Using ISO9000 (define what to do, do it and document it), proper object orientation software is (should) built like bridges.
Any major software company not reusing components and controlling the design/implementation process will fail. The reuse of components not only benefits the developers, but also the users (just look at KDE or Adobe's software, dialogs and tools are easily reused).
The reuse of software requires direction, thought and documentation. You must know what it is that you try to do, break it down into sections (objects) and define the interfaces and interactions before you sit down and write any code. This is the most common mistake when coding and the biggest problem in open source projects that begin as small personal pets of the project initiator and quickly grows out of hand.
The answer is that we've been building bridges for thousands of years, and while we can make incremental improvements to bridges, the fact is that every bridge is like some other bridge that's been built.... But in software ... we're rolling out -- if not the first -- at most the seventh or eighth version.
I hear this theory every now and then, and it's just dead wrong. The fundamental problem is that a program is thousands of times more complex than a bridge. Imagine constructing a bridge out of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of custom-fabricated tiny parts that have to fit together exactly right or the whole thing collapses. That's the correct analogy.
When you also combine that with the fact that you can look at the totality of a bridge and get a "sense" of whether it's done right or not, at best you can only look at a few hundred lines of code at a time.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Bridges don't defy physics in anyway. Just because you are ignorant of the physics behind them doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Sure, there's a creative aspect. But there's a creative aspect to the bridge-building example he describes. And while maybe on any given program you're working on only the 7th or 8th generation at most, almost any programming task that people deal with has been worked umpteen times - maybe not by them, but by someone. Let's face it, most programming is mundane, whether you work for Bank of America or Playboy, and involves working mostly the same old strategies and structures for slightly different ends. How creative can you get with bubble-sort or linked-lists, or which you've probably used tons of times before ?
The designers of the program - i.e., usually the project managers (*ducks*) or system architects do most of the creative work of conceptualizings how things will work and how they will meet the constraints of the particular problem. The programmers, most of the time, are brick-layers, carpenters and plumbers. Not that there is anything less noble about this latter work, but it's hard to call it creative.
Most of the creativity in software comes from newly emerging fields like, say, robotics, AI, or computational biology, but usually this creativity comes from the algorithms which get hashed out and proven by theoreticians, not rank-and-file programmers.
The closest thing to a proof that programming is mostly not art, that I can come up with, is this: bad programming is mostly identifiable by almost every programmer. But there is nothing close to a consensus as to what defines bad art, or bad poetry, or bad architecture. The latter judgements are far more subjective.
Almost anybody can do something new. Not necessarily something awesome and groundbreaking like the O(1) scheduler, but pretty much anybody with some skill can make their little contribution in the form of a Perl module for example.
I also like that in programming it's fairly easy to reinvent things. For example I'm pretty sure a few people reinvented bubble sort or linked lists while playing with a programming language without having read anything but the manual for that language. Gives you a nice feeling to find that you were able to come up with useful things on your own.
possibly the only person with both a Ph.D. in computer science and an MFA in poetry)
That's wonderful! For some time now I've been thinking that perhaps a computer science degree is exactly what geeks don't need. Heck, they're already wrapped up in the tech world, and they'll spend the rest of their lives coding, so while not get well rounded early on. Get a degree in history or literature or creative writing, then get the computer science degree later.
The uber-geeks are often the most stubborn, the most prone to get into Slashdot arguments, the ones who have the narrowest views. The more interesting techies with wider views often tend to get out of technical fields later on, because mindless code monkeys who think C++ is The Way and develop software by working 12-14 hour days, well, they're just so mind numbing after a while.
In school I studied both computer science and fine arts, and I consider the two extremely different. The biggest, most obvious difference is that in programming, you have a very good sense of when you're done. If your specs (either from your client, or your programming assignment) are relatively clear, you can write your code and be more-or-less satisfied that you've met them. You can write automated regression tests if you want to really make sure. (These days I almost always write automated tests.)
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... If everybody did programming the way artists do art, programming would be even more buggy and expensive, which doesn't do anything good for respect for the craft. The way to get more respect for programming is to figure out ways to make us all better programmers. Anything else is just a distraction.
But for art? Forget about it. I can't tell you how many hours I spent agonizing in front of a painting or sculpture or comic book page, wondering if it was finished, if it had enough marks or not
The two are very different. Not that one is necessarily better than the other, but they're very different.
I think comments like Gabriel's often stem for a desire to get more respect for programming. Gabriel probably compared the respect that artists get, vs. the respect that programmers get, and decided that the way to get more respect for programming is to try to convince everybody that's a sort of art.
His intentions are good, but you end up muddying the waters too much that way
Do domain names matter?
I only have a minimal knowledge of coding, but I do know a bit about writing, and this guy's poetry (or at least the excerpt in the interview) is pretty bad. The rhythm is bad, there's no interesting, imagery, etc. But that's just my opinion (he said, knowing he was about to be flamed...).
But can great coders be taught? I don't think so. A debate has been raging within the creative community for years about the value of MFAs. Many people see them as a cynical way for universities to bring in extra money by bilking minimally talented people who want to "learn" how to write.
Just like great writers, great coders seem to have an extra intuitive "something" that the rest of us don't. In my experience, the best software engineer I've worked with doesn't even have a college degree. He started coding and studying math & logic on his own at age twelve and simply evolved from there. He was a kind of computer science savant. His talent was very impressive but very mysterious, just like Faulkner's, or Eliot's, or Bishop's.
This is not real engineering.
This sad situation has come about because it's too easy to do develop this mentality in the software world, where making quick changes is as simple as hitting backspace a few times and typing some new code. ("I don't have to plan! I can get it sorta right, then fix it later! It's easy!")
When one is building a circuit, or a bridge, one can't simply make quick changes. Any changes are ltime consuming, expensive, and painful. Thus, REAL engineers actually plan stuff.
(Not that there's no room for kludges and "screwing around". I always have a "Let's mess around and do neat stuff" period at the beginning of projects. But once this is done, and we've come up with some fun and clever stuff, we roll up our sleeves and do real engineering to build a real product. And, Hey Presto!, we end up with solid and usable applications.
The mathematics behind many clever algorithms is simply astounding to me. The beauty of recursion is something as natural and poetic as music to me.
But that's to me.
Also, for me, most abstract art and whatever they call those paintings that are just a big red circle, is garbage. I think it's a waste of paint and is only meaningful to the creator. But millions of people believe this type of painting is artistic, even poetic.
Until you get to professional levels, anyone can tell a lousy poem or an ugly painting. In professional levels, it becomes more subjective. Many people are employed as painters although they aren't good at making good art. $5 paintings sold at Sears have to be painted by someone. Similarly, there are a whole lot of mediocre programmers out there, employed as programmers in a low level job. Most programmers or even logical thinkers who aren't programmers can identify bad programming, just as most people who are even casually interested in art can tell when an unskilled and untrained hand has done the painting.
But when a programmer sees a great algorithm for the first time, whether in a textbook or on a napkin, there's a certain beauty to it, a certain mathematical/locical poetry to it. The artistic pleasure comes from realizing what the artist was thinking when the made the art, whether it's an ingeniously simple technique for a peer to peer system, or a woman both in the distance and in the foreground at the same time in a Salvador Dali painting.
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> And we've only been building transistors for 50 years and chips for 30? years
Yeah, but the problem has not changed much. They are refining the solution. Software is different because if the problem has already been solved, there is little point solving it again. Sometimes people come up with better algorithms for the same problem, but often they need to solve better problems.
I have to ask, how long have you been writing software ? what great software have you produced ? Have you got proven success using this method or are you just talking out of your ass ?
> This means that one has to complete the design before one starts coding/building
This doesnt work. It was tried for many years, until people realised that its better to test assumptions along the way before committing to everything, hence waterfall model.
Part of the reason it does not work is that software *is* a design. It makes perfect sense for bridges or buildings to be designed completely first. One can have an unambiguous design which is in a different medium to the finished product, eg as a CAD model. Then you can model how it behaves more cheaply than seeing whether the bridge falls down. Try finding an analogy to that for software, er lets model the software on a computer...
The only totally unambiguous design for a piece of software is the software itself. If a design was unambiguous, one could define that as the programming language.
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I received a bachelors in computer science in 1993 and have heard of these so-called "Peer Reviews" or "Code Reviews." However, not once was I taught that in school. It would have been extremely beneficial if computer science graduates had the skills of the peer review in the same way that recent fine arts graduates (theoretically) have the skills of the critique process.
The two very different disciplines share some important characteristics. Students are taught techniques and are given the opportunity to hone their expressive skills. In fine arts, the emphasis is on the expressive skills--it's better to create a work of art that is very expressive even if the techniques are poor. Computer science, on the other hand, emphasizes technique over expression--it's better to make a program that works poorly rather than an elegant algorithm that doesn't compile.
Unfortunately the computer science student is treated like an engineer and their creative skills are not taught, but left to the student to develop on their own, and, in part through attrition, functionally creative programmers leave college. Admittedly, a fine arts student isn't taught the way to express their creative ideas, but rather, given the opportunity to hone their implicit skills for expressing those ideas. Even better, through learning the process of the critique, they are given the skills necessary to continue to learn to improve on their own.
--- Jason Olshefsky
Karma: Poser (mostly affected by adding this line long after everyone else did)
I think I've heard that a company that made titanium wrenches went broke because all of their customers bought one wrench and never needed to buy another one. Seriously, though, this just about summarizes the Achilles heel of the software industry. It is impossible to build a car that never breaks down because when moving parts rub against each other, they wear each other down, and eventually they will wear each other down so much that one or the other or both will fail. On the other hand, it is theoretically possible to write code that will never fail. (For example, there is no reason for properly written "Hello, World!" code to fail, ever) It is just that as the complexity of functionality grows, the complexity of the code to enforce proper functionality grows even faster, and people are lazy and prefer to focus on functionality rather than correctness.
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
I agree with your little theory
We are well on the way to building software by components -- for the most part we use COTS databases, operating systems, compilers, and some lower level components such as XML parsers and libraries. But to go farther we need interchangeable "software parts" (think 74xx TTL) that are fully spec'd and glue together easily (I think this latter part is going to require increased use of frameworks).
I should start reading up some more on frameworks that are out there. Perhaps look into creating some for the embedded systems I work on.
It would have been hard to get to where we are now doing things this way. But now that we have the CPU power, it's time to start going in that direction.
Cars went through the same evolution. By the 1960s, almost everybody in the US had a car, but the cars worked well for a year or two at best. It took Ralph Nader, Congress, and Japanese competition to bring cars to the point where they worked reliably. This happened over the objections of the auto industry; not until the 1980s did the auto industry finally accept that they'd been forced to do the right thing. Read Lee Iacocca's books.
What I see is that most "generic" tools become so generic, as to be completely useless. I think one of the reasons Extreme Programming is catching on, is that it does away with this concept and advocates building the simplest thing that will work.
Imagine trying to create a "generic bridge building toolkit". Certainly there are standard components from which bridges are built (i.e. bolts etc), but the idea of a generic bridge toolkit is silly.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Bridges have functional purposes, and some bridges are boring bridges that get you from point A to point B (or side A to side B, as the case may be). But many bridges also have an aesthetic (artistic) aspect, and I think that's what's being referred to.
Personally, I think it's the same with code. Given the same specs, anyone can write functional programs that do the same thing, but when you get down and look at the source, some will have a sense of beauty that go beyond pure functionality. Or it's like that warm fuzzy feeling you get when you see a really cool algorithm, solution, or design.
Or am I the only person who gets warm fuzzy feelings from code?
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> People say, 'Well, how come we can't build
> software the way we build bridges?'
Writing software is like drawing up the plans for a bridge. The bridge gets built every time the program gets run.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I agree...not that I've met very many people like that, but I'm like that in a way myself. I don't have a degree, but I've taken as many English/Lit classes as computer science classes, and have seriously considered switching to an English major (from CompSci). And I speak 4 languages (well, two fluently, one at a conversational level, and I'm learning a 4th).
Quite frankly, I'd love to be in a program like the one described in the article. The way computer sciences is taught right now seems so cold, detached, relentlesss, uninspiring and often irrelevant. Maybe this works for people who simply want to get a degree, get a job, and earn big bucks. But for someone who's in it for the love of programming (and has no ambitions of making money off of it), it's dull as all hell. That's why I like to take literature courses...at least those are interesting, thought provoking and inspiring.
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