One of my all time favorite metaphors and examples for part of what we are trying to do in this "T-shirt programming" project.
Cheers, Alan ________________________________ From: David Leibs <[email protected]> To: Fundamentals of New Computing <[email protected]> Sent: Fri, July 9, 2010 10:33:04 AM Subject: Re: [fonc] goals > > >for example, is a lot of this added code because: >the programmer has little idea what he was doing, and so just wildly >copy-pasted >everywhere and made a big mess?... >has lots of code which is actually beneficial, such as doing error checking >and >building abstractions. > >similarly, is a piece of code smaller because: >the programmer is good at getting work done in less code? >or because the code is essentially a tangled mess of hacks? > > It isn't that the programmer has little idea of what he is doing. Things just take time to be transformed into an optimal form. There is a good example from the history from math, and physics that illustrates the point. Maxwells equations originally applied to a set of eight equations published by Maxwell in 1865. After that the number of equations escalated to twenty equations in twenty unknowns as people struggled with the implications. Maxwell wrestled with recasting the equations in quaternion form. Time passed. It was all very ugly. Finally In 1884 Oliver Heaviside recast Maxwell's math from the then cumbersome form to its modern vector calculus notation, thereby reducing the twenty equations in twenty unknowns down to the four differential equations in two unknowns that we all love and call "Maxwells equations". Heaviside invented the modern notation giving us the tools to make sense of something very profound and useful. Good work on hard things takes time plus a lot of good people that care. cheers, -David Leibs
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