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  • From: Beckett <thomas AT tbeckett.com>
  • To: "Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/" <internetworkers AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [internetworkers] writing on coding
  • Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 15:20:35 -0400

There's a great interview on Salon this week with Ellen Ullman, a software engineer who has a new novel out that centers around debugging code. I haven't seen the book, but the interview itself contains a lot of interesting and intelligent observations about the nature of writing software, and touches on a lot of other things as well, from storytelling to open source.

I commend it to y'all.

TaB

Excerpt:
"Engineer" used to mean people who were working kernel-level or lower -- it referred to a level of code one was writing. If you were writing in the application space you were a programmer, and if you were writing in the system space you were an engineer. And there was some merit to that distinction. The application space has now become so complicated mainly because of all the incredible energy that's gone into the user interface.

So the term "engineer" just began to leak across the divide. It reflects the desire to try to see it all as a scientific process. But it's right in one respect: You want to build something. Engineering implies a kind of tinkering, building mentality: Let's get to work, let's get it to work. It's not about designing the most elegant machine, it's not art. The goal of engineering is to build something that works. And I think that's very much the motive in programming.


http://www.salon.com/books/int/2003/05/16/ullman/index.html





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