TAG | programming
I just got back form Elton John and Billy Joel, and while I was there it reminded me of something I’ve been thinking about for quite a while. Programming as an art form. I get a lot of inspiration from the arts — actually I first started thinking about this back in December when I went to “A Jon Schmidt Christmas”. I thought… this guy doesn’t have a chance to “make it big”, but he’s completely happy where he’s at. If he played in front of 10 people, he would be completely happy. Take that to Elton John and Billy Joel, and I think the same goes for them. They’re getting older. They don’t have to play music. But they do. They love to do it, they’re good at it, and that’s what makes them happy. So my question is, why can’t computer engineers do that? Are we really so technical, digging into the details, gathering requirements, making estimations, doing test-driven development, that we can’t express ourselves through code? Well, I think we can.
This might be where frameworks like Django and Ruby on Rails come into play. They allow you to make what you want, without the crap. When you have an idea, you can make it. You can express your ideas quickly and easily. You don’t worry about design patterns, because it’s all there for you. All that’s left to you is to “paint the picture”. Just hack it out, it doesn’t matter what the code looks like. Take a look at the most “artistic” programmers out there — the hax0rs of the world. Many of them are absolutely brilliant… but you wouldn’t think so in looking at their code. Heck, most of them don’t program object-orientedly — a must in the business world. They hack out a script that just does the job, and nothing more. I wouldn’t say that’s a bad thing. It does what it’s supposed to. What more is needed?
At any rate, I think that the longer I’m a programmer by profession, the further I get away artistic expression in programming. While I don’t think that “hacking out a solution” is a good idea for a business, I still think programmers need to do the quick hacks on their own, and make some that actually *does* something, with minimal effort. I want to be like Billy Joel when I get old and still be killing it when I’m 60, or be like one of my personal heroes, Woz. I don’t have the answer for how to get an old-timer like myself excited about that kind of thing, but when you figure it out let me know.
