Software developers can become rockstars if they have a charismatic way about them and appear on TED or other public venues. Pranav Mistry is an example. His matron at MIT called him a rockstar on TED and now he's famous for his ambient computing work. It's a very steep curve no doubt, with very few developers known to the larger population. Many of the most famous developers are only known within the software community and it drills down from there into individual specialties.
I think that to be a rockstar developer, the technology used has to be accessible and understandable on some level by the general public. It's less likely that a brilliant database programmer will become a rockstar versus a brilliant ambient computing developer, or any of the artsy environments like Processing and OpenFrameworks. An audience can more easily have an emotional response with a piece of software (art) than a piece of software (art) that is more obfuscated like a database schema. On Aug 8, 2010, at 9:34 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote: > Recently my colleagues and I had a discussion if > developers can be "rockstars". Although developers > have to be very creative, and software development is really sometimes an > art, as Dave West argued recently, software products themselves have not the > same effect on people as paintings or songs. > > Leo Tolstoy argued in his essay "What Is Art?" that art must create a > specific emotional link between artist and audience, one that "infects" the > viewer. And Maya Angelou said "People will not remember what you did, they > will not remember what you said, they will remember how you made them feel." > > In other words, stars are famous because they arise strong emotions. We enjoy > literature, art, music and movies - even if they are imaginative experiences > - because at some level we don't distinguish these experiences from real > ones. > In this sense, developers can only become stars > in their own community - among the developers > themselves. The rest of the world will only see > the surface of their products, which will barely > arouse any emotion (except anger and frustration). Do you agree? > > -J. > > > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
