What is programming?
A worry we both brought up today at the end of meeting 4 is – um will I actually ever get round to programming? There are (as always) several responses to this question - one of which is ‘stop being so output product focused.
Another response to this is, what does this say I really think programming is – is programming ‘only’ about writing code or is it thinking about all the stuff I am thinking about. This is an interesting one, I have heard a lot about how programmers can’t understand or aren’t interested in the social and yet the whole process is pretty much focused on understanding the regulation of social interactions it seems. So while the traditional method of programming is pretty formal in a process that attempts to map the social as a set of abstract high-level principles and then work down to the details of how some thing might work in ‘real’ life – there is also the more ‘modern’ extreme programming (XP) or agile programming which involves ‘design games’ like reading parts in a play, acting out roles around the designed object focused around embedding it in a social context and understanding it via a more iterative approach. I like the idea of this – well I like the idea of the theory that stands behind it in that it kind of makes the point that you can’t just design an artifact or an object and ‘drop it into a context’ that really programming is about designing a set of actions, practices. So programming is designing the social.
I am starting out writing some research proposals at the moment and this thinking about programming, and trying to get my head out of the clouds and to look at the detail of what this imagined interactive essay might be, is actually really helpful for me in thinking about what my colleague Gemma Moss keeps saying to me ‘You have the theory, forget about the theory, you know the theory - you have to find the empirical object – what it is you want to follow, where it can be found, what happens to it, what do people do with it, and what is the point – why should anyone else care!’.
There is however always at least a ‘third way’ – which is okay this is programming, all this process, but yes maybe I could learn some basic javascript and perhaps we could both learn a little AJAX. Yishay will post me a link to a basic tutorial on java and see if there is a good one on AJAX.
Another response to this is, what does this say I really think programming is – is programming ‘only’ about writing code or is it thinking about all the stuff I am thinking about. This is an interesting one, I have heard a lot about how programmers can’t understand or aren’t interested in the social and yet the whole process is pretty much focused on understanding the regulation of social interactions it seems. So while the traditional method of programming is pretty formal in a process that attempts to map the social as a set of abstract high-level principles and then work down to the details of how some thing might work in ‘real’ life – there is also the more ‘modern’ extreme programming (XP) or agile programming which involves ‘design games’ like reading parts in a play, acting out roles around the designed object focused around embedding it in a social context and understanding it via a more iterative approach. I like the idea of this – well I like the idea of the theory that stands behind it in that it kind of makes the point that you can’t just design an artifact or an object and ‘drop it into a context’ that really programming is about designing a set of actions, practices. So programming is designing the social.
I am starting out writing some research proposals at the moment and this thinking about programming, and trying to get my head out of the clouds and to look at the detail of what this imagined interactive essay might be, is actually really helpful for me in thinking about what my colleague Gemma Moss keeps saying to me ‘You have the theory, forget about the theory, you know the theory - you have to find the empirical object – what it is you want to follow, where it can be found, what happens to it, what do people do with it, and what is the point – why should anyone else care!’.
There is however always at least a ‘third way’ – which is okay this is programming, all this process, but yes maybe I could learn some basic javascript and perhaps we could both learn a little AJAX. Yishay will post me a link to a basic tutorial on java and see if there is a good one on AJAX.
posted by carey at 9:56 AM
1 Comments:
Your Blog. It's nice . Here's a subject that interests many; major depression. It's some insight into dealing with major depression.
Sonny M.
Post a Comment
<< Home