Code is not Literature

If I meet a track that I really like, I don't just listen to it. I put it on the decks, try to mix it with something else and listen how it interacts with it. I put it on the grid, sample loops, hits and small sounds. If you don't understand what I'm talking about, here's a video of Four Tet doing something similar to Jackson's Thriller:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUDsVxBtVIg

Sometimes I analyze it's structure, laying empty loops in mute tracks alongside it. Sometimes I try to recreate synths that are used. Sometimes I go to whosampled.com and try to recreate the sampling process.

I'm sure writers do the same with literature they read, too.

Don't read code. Read papers. Build a model of your algorithms etc. in your mind. Describe this model in a wiki. Translate the model into interfaces. Then write the code that implements those interfaces.

"In my life as an architect, I find that the single thing which inhibits young professionals, new students most severely, is their acceptance of standards that are too low. If I ask a student whether her design is as good as Chartres, she often smiles tolerantly at me as if to say, 'Of course not, that isn't what I am trying to do. I could never do that.'"

Then: "That standard must be our standard. If you are going to be a builder, no other standard is worthwhile."

And so he asks the same thing about programming.

"But at once I run into a problem. For a programmer, what is a comparable goal? What is the Chartres of programming? What task is at a high enough level to inspire people writing programs, to reach for the stars? Can you write a computer program on the same level as Fermat's last theorem? Can you write a program which has the enabling power of Dr. Johnson's dictionary? Can you write a program which has the productive power of Watt's steam engine? Can you write a program which overcomes the gulf between the technical culture of our civilization, and which inserts itself into our human life as deeply as Eliot's poems of the wasteland or Virginia Woolf's The Waves?"

Maybe code is just bad literature?

Your each iteration in a bottom-up process could be based on a small insight after thinking about a subproblem. Later one just re-uses ones own realizations and adapts them to new requirements.

Also I think that it should be not just linear bottom-up process, but recursive one, when you regularly "call yourself" with the old problem, but a "new you, evolved with experience". Starting from the bottom, from basic building blocks is crucial. The only "addition" is that nothing will be set in stone and you should come back to "simplify" and refactor even what is at the very bottom.

I also never advocated Knuth's idea or that whole programs should be printed as books (while some procedures such as map or append are worth to be printed and framed).

As for poetry, well, I thing almost every youth wrote some in his late teens or early twenties, and yes, I told it wrong, not a whole poem emerges in ones mind, but a few central passages, the main scheme, to which some ornaments could be added later.

Seibel studied English, has written some popular programming books, and has had the experience of trying to set up code-reading seminars at multiple companies.[1] The key points of the article were 1) many programming gurus recommend reading code yet nobody does this; and 2) applying a lit-seminar approach to investigating code doesn't really work. That's all he was saying. There's no need to imply that his understanding of literature is limited to pulp fiction (I highly doubt that it is).

If you go through life looking for opportunities to argue semantics, you won't be disappointed. But you'll also miss most of the meaning.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/s/?field-keywords=peter%20seibel