::scr Re: Cognitive Friction

[jo walsh]

> I've certainly seen and heard people who couldn't sing intuitively.
> Didn't stop the buggers trying mind. I've also heard (and sung)
> intuitive harmonies for songs that were entirely new to the people
> singing... 

i suppose i meant the humming, purring, pre-linguistic singing instinct -
a tangled thread perhaps we dont want to start here - not necessarily
aligned with formal or informal tunefulness :) 

> Why do I find myself thinking of Christopher Alexander, _A Pattern
> Language_ and a _The Timeless Way of Building_?

yes! in the idea that functions and aesthetics are inseparable, are
actually not real and separate ideas - maybe that's too extreme. though
the followers of the "Design Patterns" people have misused his gist much
worse than i hope i ever could. 

i'd like now to abuse some of alexander's "timeless way" text for you as
i've been doing in my head while reading some of it over the last week.
this is a transcription with just a few words transposed.

"<I>The power to make programs beautiful lies in each of us already.</I>

 It is a core so simple, and so deep, that we are born with it. Imagine
 the greatest possible beauty and harmony in the world - the most
 beautiful program that you have ever seen or dreamt of. You have the
 power to create it, at this very moment, just as you are.

 And this power we have is so firmly rooted and coherent in every one of
 us that once it is liberated, it will allow us, by our individual,
 unconnected acts, to make a network, without the slightest need for
 plans, because like every living process, it is a process which builds
 order out of nothing.

 <I>But as things are, we have so far beset ourselves with rules, and 
 concepts, and ideas of what must be done to make a program or a network
 alive, that we have become afraid of what will happen naturally, and 
 convinced that we must work within a "system", and with "methods", since
 without them our surroundings will come tumbling down in chaos.</I>

 We are afraid, perhaps, that without images and methods, chaos will break
 loose; worse still, that unless we use images of some kind, ourselves, 
 our own creation will itself be chaos. And why are we afraid of that? Is
 it because people will laugh at us, if we make chaos? Or is it, perhaps,
 that we are most afraid of all that if we do make chaos, we will
 ourselves be chaos, hollow, nothing?

 This is why it is so easy for others to play on our fears. They can
 persuade us that we must have more method, and more system, because we 
 are afraid of our own chaos. Without method and more method, we are 
 afraid the chaos which is in us will reveal itself. And yet these methods 
 only make things worse.

 <I>The thoughts and fears which feed these methods are illusions.</I>

 It is the fears which these illusions have created in us, that make
 software which is dead and lifeless and artificial. And - greatest irony
 of all - it is the very methods we invent to free us from our fears which
 are themselves the chains whose grip on us creates our difficulties.

 For the fact is, that this seeming chaos which is in us is a rich,
 rolling, swelling, dying, lilting, singing, laughing, shouting, crying,
 sleeping <I>order</I>. If we will only let this order guide our acts of
 programming, the programs that we make, the networks we help to make,
 will be the forests and the meadows of the human mind.

 <I>To purge ourselves of these illusions, to become free of all the 
 artificial images of order which distort the nature that is in us, we
 must first learn a discipline which teaches us the true relationship
 between ourselves and our surroundings.

 Then, once this discipline has done its work, and pricked the bubbles of
 illusion which we cling to now, we will be ready to give up the
 discipline, and act as nature does.

 This is the timeless way of programming: learning the discipline -
 and shedding it.</I>"


>    "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a language in
>     possession of a rich syntax must be in need of a rewrite."

you planning to throw one away? :)

z