Short interview (advertisement?) in Salon with Scott Rosenberg about his new book "Dreaming in Code". It is an effort to explain coding to non programmers, or as he puts it:
My goal was really more to write something that, if you were a developer, then yes, you might find it interesting. But even more, if you had a relative who was always wondering, "What is it that you do all day?" you could hand my book to that relative and say, This is what my work is really like.
Most of what he has to say really resonates with me as being correct. Especially the parts about the advantages of having only one person writing a particular piece of software.

Jonathan Rentzsch, an actual programmer (Rosenberg is just an observer,) has some push back that strikes me as correct as well.

Interesting discussion.
- jim 2-05-2007 6:53 pm

Adding to Rentzsch, I've found that programmers like incorporating code that has a solid API and that is "transparent" -- meaning: written in a manner that facilitates understanding and debugging.

We've got a brilliant programmer who likes to write nested macros that are intepreted by his own Perl scripts -- which are written with arcane variable names. He would do very well in an obfuscation contest. The other guys will re-write his stuff at the drop of a hat. Not because it's buggy code -- it's very robust -- but because it's really hard to understand what the hell is going on.
- mark 2-05-2007 8:57 pm





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