Signal to Noise

Rather than read a book on programming and project management as per my last post I let myself, more or less, float through the evening. I watched the movie Diva (find the time to watch it when you want to float through an evening) and looked at a number of photos from an art exhibit in Chatham Ontario (where you should go because the show features barbie and “ken” dolls and features the work of Laurie Langford). I currently have “Nevermore” as my screen background.

Later, because I did not have enough media pounding its way into my head, I watched the Trailer Park Boys (I believe) last special entitled “Say Goodnight to the Bad Guys” and may I never again have to see even a fleeting vision of Mr. Lahey’s penis.

There … that should take the tone of this post down sufficiently. It makes listening to Eddie Izzard discussing his visit to France to do comedy (well, it is hard to tell where the discussion of the visit ends and the comedy begins as he mentions needing to bring a cat, a mouse, and a (naughty) monkey with him in order to be able to use the French he learned in grade school in the course of conversation–the monkey later goes on to reenact the movie Speed so I am thinking there is some creative license being taken). Here is a transcript to the lead up to the aforementioned bit about reenacting Speed.

“Bonjour, je suis Anglais, je suis ici en vacances. C’est très belle ici, les couleurs, les bois, très belle.”

( inhaling ) “Tu est un travesti?”

“Oui, je suis un travesti, mais pas un travesti typical. Je suis un travesti executive… Un travesti d’action!”

“Très bien…”

This is better when viewing the performance. His rather large and dress-wearing person does make the executive transvestite / action transvestite bit rather funny.

Okay, enough floating through the day.

I read The Mythical Man Month about fifteen years ago at a time when I was trying to figure out why I got into programming and how I could be the best programmer in the world. It was one of a number of books that were considered essential reading at the time for people on my quest. As an aside, there were a surprising number of books out of Microsoft that were on that list as well–Microsoft ruled the roost back then. I like to think that I took the lessons in that book to heart, I am not sure that I actually did. I still have it at home and may give it another read this week.

I do not remember how I ended up at the site that had the following quote from The Mythical Man Month but when I read the quote it made me smile. I can remember feeling a true sense of fellowship with the author when he wrote that “[a programmer] builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination.” I still have moments when I feel that I have built something that simply did not exist before I dreamed it into being–something beautiful and poetical. There is much more in my life now than programming and I am not nearly as good as I once was but on the few times that I can look back at what I have built and I think that it is beautiful I am, just for a second, a poet.

Why is programming fun? What delights may its practioner expect as his reward?

First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God’s delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness and newness of each leaf and each snowflake.

Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and to find it helpful. In this respect the programming system is not essentially different from the child’s first clay pencil holder “for Daddy’s office.”

Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate.

Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task. In one way or another the problem is ever new, and its solver learns something: sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both.

Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. (…)

Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separately from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.

Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men.

Taken from here quoting The Mythical Man Month.