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To paraphrase William S. Burroughs from his 1978 lectures, "Creative Reading," In teaching creative writing there is the implicit assumption that the student c
by agentultra 12y ago
To paraphrase William S. Burroughs from his 1978 lectures, "Creative Reading,"
In teaching creative writing there is the implicit assumption that the student can write; that is put words to paper.
He instead eschews the traditional method of teaching a student to write well and instead focuses on teaching them how to read well on a hunch that it will help the student to recognize good writing and why they appreciate it.
An idea I've been revisiting (as other luminaries such as Donald Knuth and Peter Siebel have gone before) is why code is hardly ever read creatively. Is it something about the procedural epistemology of certain languages? Are inductive or deductive styles easier to comprehend? Why is the artifact of our labor so divorced from its realization (source vs. execution)?
Siebel says we should approach the reading of code as the Natural Philosophers of their time approached a new specimen. Knuth, as far as I know, still advocates literate programming but admitted in Coders at Work that he doesn't read that much code.
And a new idea being popularized is data-oriented programming which suggests that the design of the program should be divorced from its implementation which should model the data flow as closely to the hardware as possible -- implying that readability is a secondary concern; further divorcing source code from intent and purpose.
Literacy when it comes to code... appears to me at this point to be an oxymoron.
It's not a novel idea to teach kids to code. I rode the tail end of a hysteric push to teach kids to code in the 80s. A difficulty for me is that the languages we have today are far more complicated. But we also have some better tools... scratch has worked well when one curious niece and nephew asked what I was doing.
Programming need not be this intense mental task with textual interfaces and machine-oriented semantics. It's a useful skill to have: abstracting ideas to symbols and applying transformations to them. A skill worth picking up, some cynical types postulate, if you want to have a job in the next 10 years.