> That former group has different motivations, I believe. What motivates those
> super-hackers
> who become obsessed with code and end up inventing something like Linux? What
> motivates them?
>... What motivates someone to pick up programming without any previous
>background (and
> without, presumably, any desire to make it a profession)?
> My guess is that these aren't at all the same kind of motivation. In
> fact, one might argue that the activities that the super-hacker and the
> end-user programmer are engaging in are dramatically different from each
> other. Programming at the level of 100 lines or less, vs. 10,000 lines
> and up is very different. We may be talking about completely different
> psychologies, considering both affect and cognition.
Let's go back to the example of music. There are many more amateur musicians
than professional ones, and the act of being a professional musician is quite
different from being an amateur. But I see no evidence that the psychologies of
the amateurs is particularly different from the professionals. However, I am
not sure how to equate the 100 lines v 10000 lines argument to music though :
perhaps its the number of pieces that someone knows, but again there are
amateurs who know many more pieces than some professionals. The main difference
between the groups is that, usually, though it is by no means a given, the
professionals are better (in some sense) than the amateurs. This is generally
due to the fact that it is their job and they do it every day and because they
tend to have had various disciplines ingrained in them as part of their
training ("Music engineering" if you will). Amateurs often do not have time to
practice enough to get the necessary chops (though I think of the Japanese
Salaryman who comes home every night from his job and practices Django style
guitar for 3 hours in a small soundproof annex he built in his bedroom). Many
professionals simply don't practice (I was having a conversation about this the
other night with a tenor player). Someone followed Paganini around for years
hoping to see him practice, and used to spy on him. He only ever saw him pick
up the violin once, work out a couple of finger patterns and then put it down
again. There is an interesting difference between rehearsal and practice, and
neither of these seem to have analogues in programming practice. I certainly
don't do anything that is the equivalent of running scales or arpeggios ( a
programmer's Hanon anyone?), and the nearest to rehearsals is makign a
prototype or a first cut that you later refine, which might be the same.
L.
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