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_why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius

smashingmagazine.com

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Re: _why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius

#121

Post by elight »

bootload wrote: post #42
gdp wrote: post #16

Articles about _why on HN seem to always take on a particularly sycophantic quality. As a non-fan of Ruby, his contributions to programming outside of that community seem minimal. The ethic that people appear to ascribe to him ("programming as art") is precisely the opposite to that which I generally advocate ("programming as science"). I (and others) often suggest that the former approach is actually harmful to soft…

"... vastly over-stating the contributions of this one guy in HN comments ..." You are right to be cynical but this time I think you missed the mark. The author gives numerous examples of work "Why" produced. Their merit cannot be taken away. Just as important is the effect "Why" had on the Ruby community and other programmers who I imagine are just as or even bigger cynics. There's John Resig, Zed Shaw and Fábio Aki…

John Resig only invented jQuery. Small feat there.

Sarcasm aside, _why's influence was felt beyond the Ruby community.

Re: _why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius

#122

Post by mapleoin »

I keep waiting for a group of people to someday come out and say that _why was actually a hoax. That there was actually a group of people secretly signing their works with the same name with the goal of starting a new programming movement.

Re: _why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius

#123

Post by jgg »

silentbicycle wrote: post #102
jgg wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Note that this response isn't an attack on you specifically, it's just my feelings towards this argument in general) Where is the magical divide between "art" and "science" in the field? Do the adherents of either side even know what they're defending? If I know what a finite state machine is and how to apply it, does that make me "scientific"? If I hack together a web application in Scheme, instead of some Mathemag…

> If I hack together a web application in Scheme, instead of some Mathemagical, Dijkstra-approved language, does that make me an "artist"? Dijkstra would not have liked this.

:)

Was it Dijkstra that advocated writing everything in assembly, or am I thinking of someone else? I know he was big on formally verifying the correctness of programs, but I thought I remember him saying that for implementation purposes, he advocated assembly. Or was that more of a "if you can't write it in assembly, you don't understand all the parts" deal? It seems he hated FORTRAN, APL, BASIC, and PL/1, and only later did he like LISP.

I wonder what he would have thought of Haskell. Standardization started in the 80's, so he would have been alive when it was being ironed out. A search in the EWD archives didn't reveal anything though.

EDIT:

http://userweb.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12x...

It appears that he liked functional languages...

>The clarity and economy of expression that the language of functional programming permits is often very impressive, and, but for human inertia, functional programming can be expected to have a brilliant future, the more so because today's computers admit quite efficient implementations of functional programming languages.

but...

>In particular, evaluating a functional program with pen and paper is a pain in the neck!

So he spends the rest of the paper talking about the predicate calculus and relation calculus.

Re: _why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius

#124

Post by crazydiamond »

amix wrote: post #12

What we can learn from _why is non-attachment to our work and not taking everything so fucking seriously. We should see our work as art and enjoy every moment of it!

> What we can learn from _why is non-attachment to our work

Non-attachment -- Exactly how? If so why delete your work ? That shows his attachment to it. iirc, there was some discontent over one of his libraries being overtaken by another (nokogiri ?). There were benchmarks that showed his lib to be slower. then he improved his lib. this went on. he did seem a bit annoyed, if i recall.

Re: _why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius

#125

Post by nir »

jacquesm wrote: post #73
nir wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A few million creative artists would probably disagree without you, some violently so There are a lot of creative people, for sure. Discussing whether X is more creative than Y is meaningless. Ultimately it's about how X or Y's work resonates with you. > Yes, it was nice to have him around, no, he's not that special. Have a look at Alan Kay for an example of someone who is special. "In my opinion". Personally, I've…

> I would never imagine a language tutorial that would be essentially a cartoon, and a pretty brilliant one at that, Have a look at the early TRS-80 manuals, they were exactly that, no soundtrack though, it was on 'dead tree' format for want of a bit-mapped display on that particular computer. That does not diminish what _why did but it is not quite as original as you may think. > Looking at his entire body work, it'…

TRS80 comics (at least the ones I find online) aren't tutorials, more like a Radio Shack/DC comics marketing collaboration.

Certainly a lot of people donate their time to open source projects. Many of them do it while being paid by a company or a university to work on that code. Many others later us it as a base to start companies or consulting careers.

There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but _why did stand out, especially among the Ruby community in the mid '00s, as someone who could easily make $200/hr consulting, and chose not to do so. I don't know many (of course there are some) who willingly choose that path.

Otherwise we pretty much agree :)

Re: _why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius

#127

Post by jacquesm »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #126
jacquesm wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

_why really is a brand then.

Why do you say that JackM?

Because nobody here would care if I would write 'zerogravitas' or 'ZeroGravitas' to indicate you.

It's just a moniker, a handle. As soon as you start to assign great weight to the spelling and the special look ("It has to have an _") of a nickname then you're definitely in branding territory.

Just like "The artist formerly called Prince" is a brand, so is "_why, they lucky stiff".

Re: _why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius

#128

Post by jacquesm »

nir wrote: post #125
jacquesm wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would never imagine a language tutorial that would be essentially a cartoon, and a pretty brilliant one at that, Have a look at the early TRS-80 manuals, they were exactly that, no soundtrack though, it was on 'dead tree' format for want of a bit-mapped display on that particular computer. That does not diminish what _why did but it is not quite as original as you may think. > Looking at his entire body work, it'…

TRS80 comics (at least the ones I find online) aren't tutorials, more like a Radio Shack/DC comics marketing collaboration. Certainly a lot of people donate their time to open source projects. Many of them do it while being paid by a company or a university to work on that code. Many others later us it as a base to start companies or consulting careers. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but _why did stand o…

I'm referring to a very wide (at least 45 cm wide by 25 high) volume of about 200 pages that came with those first machines to teach you basic. The whole thing was a running cartoon and by the end you could write simple programs.

The Radio Shack/DC comics stuff is definitely not what I refer to.

And we don't know if why didn't choose to do $200/hr consulting jobs, he may have done the _why thing on the side.

Re: _why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius

#129

Post by richardw »

j-g-faustus wrote: post #117
nandemo wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never read much of _why's work so I don't have much to add to the thread, except that: I did read that quote by _why some months ago and it hasn't gotten off my head since then. It's like a mantra, and for me it alternates between being inspiring and depressing. Perhaps I disagree with you. I think programming is a craft, but that's different from art. In any case, though every time we write some code we're crea…

The entire concept of art is relatively recent (from the Renaissance on), the ancient Greeks considered a sculptor to be a craftsman just like a smith or carpenter. And the Renaissance artists had to make a living somehow, much of their art we know today was made to order for Church, State or rich merchants. We may consider "pure art" to be "form without function" and "pure utility" to be "function without form". But…

"And just like with bridge building, the form part is optional"

Sometimes function is optional as well!:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Obfuscated_C_Code...

Re: _why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius

#130

Post by modokode »

RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #82
jgg wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Note that this response isn't an attack on you specifically, it's just my feelings towards this argument in general) Where is the magical divide between "art" and "science" in the field? Do the adherents of either side even know what they're defending? If I know what a finite state machine is and how to apply it, does that make me "scientific"? If I hack together a web application in Scheme, instead of some Mathemag…

To quote Theo Jansen, "The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_Jansen

And to counter with a Donald Knuth quote, "We should continually be striving to transform every art into a science: in the process, we advance the art."
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