Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

internetworkers - Re: [internetworkers] writing on coding

internetworkers AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "David R. Matusiak" <dave AT matusiak.org>
  • To: internetworkers AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [internetworkers] writing on coding
  • Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 15:39:28 -0400

i think Ellen has a lot of interesting things to say, *especially* her observations of "our culture." (our culture being the computing/engineering realm, that is.) someone forwarded me this link a few months back and i had to comment that it was some of the most interesting reading i've done on the net in years. not everyone agrees with her perspective, but it is interesting.

http://carbon.cudenver.edu/stc-link/engineering/engr3400/ullman.html

note the extra "L" in the page title (and first line of page).

has proofreading gone the way of the cute little Taco Bell dog?
/drm

On Monday, May 19, 2003, at 03:20 PM, Beckett wrote:

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

--
have you seen the roses? http://matusiak.org/

--




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page