2005-11-25
Art
Lerner & Moguilevsky, two Jewish musicians from Argentina with their roots in Russia and Poland playing klezmer. I’ve just been to their concert. It was great. It’s not really the popular kind of klezmer, the jiddish festival music. They use the tunes and rhythms. Every song has many unexpected changes with influences of jazz, tango and contemporary music. Nearly every note is a surprise. It moves you! They play with passion and don’t eschew unusual sounds. That’s what art is to me. An artist knows where to put the dissonant notes to let it sound great. Painters, writers, all artists have this quality. They surprise you with the unpleasant, create a tension. Art moves you, makes you reflect.
I’ll never be an artist. I can’t use dissonant notes the right way. When my hands touch the piano only very dull children songs will be heard. I usually call myself an engineer. It sounds like the Dutch / French ingénieur, from the same root as ingenuity, but I’m not really comfortable with this name. Engineering is not at all ingenious. It is just applying the right procedures. That’s not what software development is like. I’m also not a scientist either. Science is just analysis without application of the knowledge. I’m applying knowledge, but can’t use procedures for this. I have got to think up procedures to solve problems.
Writing software is not a structured activity. If software could be written by the simple application of a set of rules, we didn’t need software developers any more. Anybody could just fill a form with requirements and let the computer generate the software. Well, it’s not like that at all. Software development is a creative and dynamic process. The result of this dynamic activity is structure and procedures. This interaction of something dynamic on static structures is part of the Metaphysics of Quality, developed by Robert M. Pirsig (his life and more...) in his second book Lila, an inquiry into morals. The first book of this author is more famous. It is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, an inquiry into values. Well, this brings us back to the topic: art.
Pirsig does not learn you much about Zen or Motorcycles, but he talks about art.
A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself. (chapter 8)
"Look at a novice workman or a bad workman and compare his expression with that of a craftsman whose work you know is excellent and you'll see the difference. The craftsman isn't ever following a single line of instruction. He's making decisions as he goes along. For that reason he'll be absorbed and attentive to what he's doing even though he doesn't deliberately contrive this. His motions and the machine are in a kind of harmony. He isn't following any set of written instructions because the nature of the material at hand determines his thoughts and motions, which simultaneously change the nature of the material at hand. The material and his thoughts are changing together in a progression of changes until his mind's at rest at the same time the material's right."
"Sounds like art," the instructor says.
"Well, it is art," I say. "This divorce of art from technology is completely unnatural."(chapter 14)
Hey, I’ve read something like that before: Donald Knuth’s speech Computer Programming as an Art. Knuth explains that the Latin root of art is ars, artis meaning skill. The corresponding Greek word is τεχνη, the root of both technology and technique. "The word 'science'", he says, "seems to have been used for many years in about the same sense as 'art'". Furthermore he says: "A scientific approach is generally characterized by the words logical, systematic, impersonal, calm, rational, while an artistic approach is characterized by the words aesthetic, creative, humanitarian, anxious, irrational. It seems to me that both of these apparently contradictory approaches have great value with respect to computer programming." So I'm a scientist and an artist?
But still, the artist creates a work with tension in it, ‘unpleasant’ surprises that makes one reflect. My software should not have surprises and certainly not disturb the users or make them reflect when they use it. Needless to say that I’m not working for this company that makes this well-known word processor that surprises you all the time, because it does something that could be helpful, but never is what you wanted. Certainly this is not a work of art or science either.
Maybe the reality is that I’m trained as a scientist, work like an artist and deliver a piece of engineering. But that is a bit long for a business card.
I’ll never be an artist. I can’t use dissonant notes the right way. When my hands touch the piano only very dull children songs will be heard. I usually call myself an engineer. It sounds like the Dutch / French ingénieur, from the same root as ingenuity, but I’m not really comfortable with this name. Engineering is not at all ingenious. It is just applying the right procedures. That’s not what software development is like. I’m also not a scientist either. Science is just analysis without application of the knowledge. I’m applying knowledge, but can’t use procedures for this. I have got to think up procedures to solve problems.
Writing software is not a structured activity. If software could be written by the simple application of a set of rules, we didn’t need software developers any more. Anybody could just fill a form with requirements and let the computer generate the software. Well, it’s not like that at all. Software development is a creative and dynamic process. The result of this dynamic activity is structure and procedures. This interaction of something dynamic on static structures is part of the Metaphysics of Quality, developed by Robert M. Pirsig (his life and more...) in his second book Lila, an inquiry into morals. The first book of this author is more famous. It is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, an inquiry into values. Well, this brings us back to the topic: art.
Pirsig does not learn you much about Zen or Motorcycles, but he talks about art.
A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself. (chapter 8)
"Look at a novice workman or a bad workman and compare his expression with that of a craftsman whose work you know is excellent and you'll see the difference. The craftsman isn't ever following a single line of instruction. He's making decisions as he goes along. For that reason he'll be absorbed and attentive to what he's doing even though he doesn't deliberately contrive this. His motions and the machine are in a kind of harmony. He isn't following any set of written instructions because the nature of the material at hand determines his thoughts and motions, which simultaneously change the nature of the material at hand. The material and his thoughts are changing together in a progression of changes until his mind's at rest at the same time the material's right."
"Sounds like art," the instructor says.
"Well, it is art," I say. "This divorce of art from technology is completely unnatural."(chapter 14)
Hey, I’ve read something like that before: Donald Knuth’s speech Computer Programming as an Art. Knuth explains that the Latin root of art is ars, artis meaning skill. The corresponding Greek word is τεχνη, the root of both technology and technique. "The word 'science'", he says, "seems to have been used for many years in about the same sense as 'art'". Furthermore he says: "A scientific approach is generally characterized by the words logical, systematic, impersonal, calm, rational, while an artistic approach is characterized by the words aesthetic, creative, humanitarian, anxious, irrational. It seems to me that both of these apparently contradictory approaches have great value with respect to computer programming." So I'm a scientist and an artist?
But still, the artist creates a work with tension in it, ‘unpleasant’ surprises that makes one reflect. My software should not have surprises and certainly not disturb the users or make them reflect when they use it. Needless to say that I’m not working for this company that makes this well-known word processor that surprises you all the time, because it does something that could be helpful, but never is what you wanted. Certainly this is not a work of art or science either.
Maybe the reality is that I’m trained as a scientist, work like an artist and deliver a piece of engineering. But that is a bit long for a business card.
# posted by Sander @ 22:32 
