::scr Re: doesn't have the morlocks

[jonah]

on 5/4/02 3:40 am, jo walsh at jo@abduction.org wrote:

> earle and i were chatting yesterday about how terribly important it
should
> be for programmers and designers to understand and practise each
> others disciplines, for us all to be or stay more interdisciplinary
> and not be drawn into forced-labour specialisation. aesthetics, the
> importance of a subtle, barely or rarely appreciable aesthetics in
> everything we do; code, sculpture, chip design, cookery, tig welding.

I so wholeheartedly agree with this, or should I say AOL? I've spent my
working life trying to avoid specialising myself into a corner. It's why
I've tried to keep my hand in with
photoshopping/premiering/flashing/writing as well as the (to me, now) much
more interesting activity of programming. I've always wanted to maintain a
kind of generalist or good all-rounder status. Doesn't always work, but
there you go.

This is why I find my designer-turned-programmer chum Howard so
fascinating. He's never let any notion of "I'm not supposed to be able to
do this" hold him back from pursuing his interests. Okay, sure, I saw his
early, first bits of code and some of it looked like this:

if ($foo = "fred") {
    $bar = "fred";
} elsif ($foo = "barney") {
    $bar = "barney";
}

But than I'm sure that the first graphics I created look clumsy,
unsophisticated and crudely-made to Howard. But the above code example is,
I think, an interesting illustration of how there's a mindset to coding,
as I'm sure we all know. It's not innate, it's learning how to look at the
problem, as Richard says.

> isnt the ideal for our whole industry to be redundant, almost our
> whole work to be automated, leaving us free to do more human or animal
> things?

That's *never* going to happen while we have a capitalist system as the
foundation for our society, purely for practical reasons. There needs to
be an enormous Cultural paradigm shift before we can automate all the
donkey work and concentrate on doing the fun things. It's arguable that we
have the technology, but as a society, we don't have the will to let go of
the systems we've got used to.

But that's a whole other thread, and probably one not suitable for ::scr.

-- 
matt
PS smells of hemp rope and gumbo.