Code, art, coding

I’ve read this article a long time ago. It’s an interesting perspective, but I do not constrain the work of writing code to dry logic.

I understand the author’s feelings when he writes, “While code may not be art, it can be artistic”. Neither do I view code itself as fulfilling, though well-designed code can be artistic.

The process of designing well-designed code is what gives me a sense of fulfillment. I stitch my best designwork into every tapestry. Then I learn from my mistakes.

In sum:

Code is not art, though it can be artistic.

Code design is art.

Writing code involves code design. For me, the two are inseparable.

On scripting languages

I think this post at lesscode.org makes an excellent point.

MS is to developers…

Today, I found on two interesting articles on joel.reddit.com, detailing experiences for and against different aspects of the Microsoft work culture.

Interesting reads.

I like joel.reddit.com.

scripting vs typed languages

Interesting contrast here.

But I think that IDE’s aren’t the only frontier of progress. The ruby on rails framework takes the informality of the ruby language seriously. This informal ease with which ruby can “write” code on-the-fly is what helped David Heinemeier Hansson start writing the rails framework, and it is responsible for a lot of the rails magic.

Statically typed syntax has a lot of formality in the expression that would simply make a rails-like framework hard or impossible to write.

Formality is inherent in statically typed languages. This is Groovy will help Java immensely.