TITLE: Writing about Doing
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: March 15, 2007  4:55 PM
DESC: 
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<IMG SRC="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog-images/people/elvis-costello.jpg"
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Last week I ran across this quote by noted rocker Elvis
Costello:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture --
it's really a stupid thing to want to do.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

My immediate reaction was an intense <STRONG>no</STRONG>.
I'm not a dancer, so my reaction was almost exclusively
to the idea of writing about music or, by extension, other
creative activities.  Writing is the residue of thinking,
an outward manifestation of the mind exploring the world.
It is also, we hope, occasionally a sign of the mind growing,
and those who read can share in the growth.

I don't imagine that dancing is at all like writing in this
respect.

Perhaps Costello meant specifically writing about music and
other pure arts.  But I did
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2005-04.html#e2005-04-07T07_49_17.htm">
   study architecture</A>
for a while, and so I know that architecture is not a pure
art.  It blends the artistic and purely creative with an
unrelenting practical element: human livability.  People
have to be able to use the spaces that architects create.
This duality means that there are two levels at which one
can comment on architecture, the artistic and the functional.
Costello might not think much of people writing about the
former, but he may allow for the value in people writing
about the latter.

I may be overthinking this short quote, but I think it might
have made more sense for Costello to have made this analogy:
"Writing about music is like designing a house about dancing
...".  But that doesn't have any of the zip of his original!

I can think of one way in which Costello's original makes
some sense.  Perhaps it is taken out of context, and implicit
in the context is the notion of <EM>only</EM> writing about
music.  When someone is only a critic of an art form, and
not a doer of the art form, there is a real danger of becoming
disconnected from what practitioners think, feel, and do.
When the critic is disconnected from the reality of the domain,
the writing loses some or all of its value.  I still think it
is possible for an especially able mind to write about without
doing, but that is a rare mind indeed.

What does all this have to do with a blog about software and
teaching?  I find great value in many people's writing about
software and about teaching.  I've learned a lot about how to
build more expressive, more concise, and more powerful software
from people who have shared their experiences writing such
software.  The whole
<A HREF="http://hillside.net/patterns/">
   software patterns</A>
movement is founded upon the idea that we should share our
experiences of what works, when and why.  The
<A HREF="http://www.pedagogicalpatterns.org/">
   pedagogical patterns</A>
community and the SIGCSE community do the same for teachers.
Patterns really do have to be founded in experience, so "only"
writing patterns without practicing the craft turns out to be
a hollow exercise for both the reader and the writer, but
writing about the craft is an essential way for us to share
knowledge.  I think we can share knowledge both of the practical,
functional parts of software and teaching and of the artistic
element -- what it is to make software that people <EM>want</EM>
to read and reuse, to make courses that people want to take.
In these arts, beauty affects functionality in a way that we
often forget.

I don't yet have an appetite for dancing about software,
but my mind is open on the subject.
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