This article really makes sense for me. Not in terms of what should be taught in American schools, but in terms of why I’m a geek and what that actually means. Once you get past the barrier of what could be described as a formal language system – syntax and vocabulary – programming is all about the fuzzy stuff:
“The majority of his contemporaries apparently claimed that using the logical, left-brain symbols associated with their work was NOT how they did their work. These were simply the tools they used to communicate it. What they used to do the works was much… fuzzier. Intuition. Visualization. Sensation (Einstein talked of a kinesthetic element). Anthropomorphizing. Metaphors.”
Also, from Code like a girl:
“Because caring about things like beauty makes us better programmers and engineers. We make better things. Things that aren’t just functional, but easy to read, elegantly maintainable, easier–and more joyful–to use, and sometimes flat-out sexy. A passion for aesthetics can mean the difference between code that others enjoy working on vs. code that’s stressful to look at.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about the differences between good code and bad recently because I’ve been migrating someone else’s codebase to new templates and it’s been a bit of a nightmare. I feel almost tainted by dealing with such dodgy code but in some ways it’s been a good learning experience because it’s reinforced that elegance and the ability to abstract and refactor code is really really important. Though I’m not too sure ‘code like a girl’ works as a generalisation because apart from the gender stereotypes, this ugly code was written by a woman.
I’ve only recently discovered Creating Passionate Users but it’s a joy to read.

One thought on “

  1. benz says:

    You are such a geek…

Comments are closed.