151–160 of 230 posts
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I don't disagree with you, but painting, sculpting, playing an instrument, writing, etc, all crafts, by that definition.
For musical instruments, at least, there are clearly defined technical exercises with no artistic value. They are usually necessary, but not sufficient, to be able to perform artistically.
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They're social scientists/linguists undergrads first, programmers second, but programming plays a vital role in their academic career. This is only because of the sad state of education where programming is this incredibly rare black magic that less than 1% of the people in your field know. (Mathematicians and Physicists obviously excluded.) But this is changing, it has not been the case in physics since for ever, an…
when everybody is trained with at least a basic ability to program, then your super advantage is gone Yes, but like Math, not everybody can be trained in it. People either get math or they don't. Everybody has to take calculus to become a scientist or a doctor but most people never really get it and forget it shortly after taking the classes. I imagine the same will happen with programming: there will be a few requir…
2. Add 600 million Indians, 500 MM Chinese, 110 MM Americans, 100 MM Indonesians, 80+ MM Brazilians, and 40+ MM Russians under the age of 25 [1].
3. Mix thoroughly in your Internet's blender of culture and ethics.
4. Vigorously shake world economic dynamics, then allow 10 years to settle.
5. Voilà!
[1] Population data from Wolframalpha.
>Finally, I will say that learning to create software changes you and makes you different. This is so very true in my experience. The way I think has fundamentally changed since programming became the primary professional/pastime activity in my life about two years ago. I'm 32, and everything from my politics to my decisions about where to live has been effected. (Whether I'm using the proper choice between 'effect'/…
Seymore Papert, in Mindstorms : "By deliberately learning to imitate mechanical thinking, the learner becomes able to articulate what mechanical thinking is and what it is not. The exercise can lead to greater confidence about the ability to choose a cognitive style that suits the problem. Analysis of "mechanical thinking" and how it is different from other kinds and practice with problem analysis can result in a new…
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Exactly! It's not about being "the lab's IT guy", writing content management systems for a pharmaceutical company, or parsing medical records. This is just another boring programming job. Some real life examples. I know a social science university teacher whose undergrads are dabbling in statistical and field data-entry software, and it is getting them into amazing projects. Another example: a friend, comp-sci grad,…
They're social scientists/linguists undergrads first, programmers second, but programming plays a vital role in their academic career. This is only because of the sad state of education where programming is this incredibly rare black magic that less than 1% of the people in your field know. (Mathematicians and Physicists obviously excluded.) But this is changing, it has not been the case in physics since for ever, an…
But to be honest, programming isn't black magic here. Not in an university. Music majors have to learn CSound, PureData and Max/MSP. Visual artists need Processing and Quartz Composer. Architects here have programming on the first semester (some of them wrote some badass Blender scripts in python). And that's just the ones I know.
Oh, and since I mentioned music software, a good portion of the indie audio-plugin community (the ones that gather around www.kvr-audio.com) is made of musicians, ex-musicians and the sort. Ableton Live (a game-changer in music software) was started by a german duo called Monolake.
I believe Zed's point is that there's a lot of potential for programmers outside of computer science and corporate software. Domain knowledge can lead to amazing things.
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Yeah, I'd generalize the advice to: don't be a programmer, be a domain expert who happens to write good code. I think that's still extremely valuable advice in a world where "hackers" are obsessed with the whizziest language, version-control system, editor, database flavor, etc., and other sorts of largely irrelevant technical ephemera that ages like dead fish. Meanwhile, nobody understands statistics. It's a problem…
See also "Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All", by the same author. http://zedshaw.com/essays/programmer_stats.html
I got bored with programming so I started to break out into more mathy things like machine learning and computational linguistics. It's the best of both worlds.
I got bored with programming so I started studying guitar. Way more fun.
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Well, other than that he's completely mistaken about the career advice he offers here. I'd be very curious to know if he's ever been the highly-respected programmer in a science lab, or personally knows anyone who is. My science friends tell me the job doesn't exist; any code that needs writing, a grad student will do it sufficiently well (on top of their lab work) for no more money.
So wrong. I worked in academia for a decade and the code written by Hgrad students is a problem... but 95% of faculty are so clueless about computers they have no idea. And decent grad students know it. I've worked in physics and chemistry and I've seen this code... It is like a ten year old with cheez whiz sealing your bathroom. It works for a while, but it is not professional code. Smart domain experts know they ar…
My guess is that I've been coding for longer than Zed, and I don't remember _ever_ thinking it was boring, and a lot of the stuff he says might be true for Zed, it sure as hell isn't true for the rest of us: "Programming as a profession is only moderately interesting. It can be a good job, but if you want to make about the same money and be happier, you could actually just go run a fast food joint." If this is actual…
I didn't say programming was boring, I said the profession was boring.
It's a good thing I didn't write the book for you, since you seem to be unable to read.