Code Development As Art
Friday, December 24, 2004
Art as science. Science as development.
I believe creating software systems can be so much more than an engineering effort. Algorithms, code formatting, performance, extensibility, re-use; all of these are dimensions of the creative aspect of programming and afford rare left/right brain engineers an outlet for the imprecise, the immesurable, the creative.
Sure, software systems should have utility. They should be created for a purpose, but in doing so careful attention should be paid to the most minute detail of their construction. From an obvious, technical perspective this is required. The system must function. The system must behave. It must respond to input and work the way the user works. It must be flexible and adaptable. However, to approach a software system's architecture from an engineering perspective alone, to design a human/machine interface via simply a flowchart and database ERD is to participate in the churn - the mindless rehashing of like systems created over and over again; systems that are doomed to disuse, never maintained and destined for replacement again and again.
Visual Thesaurus
Posted byEric at 10:00 AM
