Zen of Computer Programming

Bob Sneidar bobs at twft.com
Mon Jan 9 12:34:06 EST 2012


Hmmm... I am not sure that I agree with this. Doesn't the whole thing beg the question, what do you mean by "the best programmers"? Just because someone has a kind of photographic memory that others do not possess, does not necessarily make him a good programmer in my opinion. He might just produce a flawless piece of digital crap for all you know, something that has no bugs but does nothing anyone needs or wants, or else does not do it in a way that is very intuitive to the lesser of the species, namely people like me. 

Also, consider the statement, "Legend has it that Delean wrote all of the FITS code by hand during a five-year sojourn in the French Alps, practicing a sort of Zen development. He's since come down from the mountain with a truly unique program." Well which is it? Did he actually do it, or is it the stuff of "Legend"? Is there any way to verify this? Could it just be brilliant PR? 

I suppose a highly functioning autism could produce this phenomenon in theory, but I don't think that someone who has it would be the best choice for producing software of general use. Just my opinion though. In other words, I've got me dou'ts. 

Bob


On Jan 9, 2012, at 8:59 AM, Alejandro Tejada wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> Recently I was talking with one of my students from
> Macromedia FreeHand/Adobe Photoshop classes:
> http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.2733273854751.2150939.1344437396&type=1&l=7917ab7ac2
> and he asked me if the following was true:
> 
> "The best computer programmers could create a
> flawless program without the need to run this
> program in a computer."
> 
> Well, (I said him), I read about a software developer
> named Bruno Delean who created his software namde
> "Live Picture" in this way... but it's not common.
> 
> http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3065/is_n12_v23/ai_16090826/
> 
> "Live Picture's extraordinary performance is achieved by virtue of a
> radical new concept/technology called FITS
> (Functional Interpolating Transformation System), which was developed
> by Bruno Delean of Toulouse, France-based FITS Imaging.
> 
> 
> My question to all of you is,
> 
> How many developers you know that could create almost flawless
> programs without running and debugging?
> 
> What is their special gift?
> 
> Thanks in advance!
> 
> Al
> 
> --
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> Sent from the Revolution - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
> 
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