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Drummers and bass players are semi-sentient vegetables. They
don't program well. ;-)
Music is programming and that is why it analogizes
so well to computer geekery. History teaches analytical
skills for human contexts and that analogizes well to the
kinds of analysis one does when creating production-worthy
systems. Lawyers know where the money is. At the end
of the day, programming isn't that hard to learn and law
is. One sees many 12 year old kids programming
and few practicing law.
Most of the spectacular failures of the computing
industry involved designers so absorbed in the depths of
set theory, turing machines, the perfect one pass
parse, who can write the fastest algorithm, and so on
that they forget that humans create, use and pay for
the information. The spectacular winning technologies
make it easier for them to do that even if it costs the
programmer some time in machine cycles or skateboarding.
Powerpoint makes it easy to produce a decent looking
presentation. It can't make a dumb author smarter but
it won't make a smart audience dumber. It might bore
them but not as much as bad phrasing and a whiny or
monotone voice.
XML makes life easier for programmers and harder for
humans. That is why it is a technology in search
of a human audience. It made the programmers feel
smarter and the user interface feel dumber.
len
From: Bob Wyman [mailto:bob@wyman.us]
Claude L. Bullard wrote:
> The best grounding, IMO, for programming if nothing
> else is provided is symbolic logic. Otherwise,
> history and music.
I remember reading a research paper many years ago that
discussed this subject. The curious thing was that they claimed that
not all music was a good background for programming. The claim was
that people that played woodwinds and strings ended up being better at
coding then others. Percussionists were at the bottom of the list as
well as some of the brass instruments (including Tuba -- which was my
instrument...) An attempt was made in the paper to explain the
difference. The best explanation they could come up with was based on
the idea that the woodwinds, etc. had to deal with shorter notes and
thus had to have a deeper appreciation of the pattern, system or
complexity of the music than those who played instruments which
focused on longer notes. This paper was a long time ago, so don't ask
me for more details...
Something that I've noticed over the years is that the
programming business has a lot of ex-lawyers in it. Many of the ones
that I've worked with have been among the best coders I've known...
bob wyman
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