TITLE: Notes from a Master Designer
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: August 31, 2010 7:18 PM
DESC:
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BODY:
Someone tweeted recently about a
recent interview with Fred Brooks
in Wired magazine. Brooks is one of
the giants of our field, so I went straight to
the page. I knew that I wanted to write something
about the interview as soon as I saw this exchange,
which followed up questions about how a 1940s
North Carolina schoolboy ended up working with
computers:
Wired: When you finally got your hands on a
computer in the 1950s, what did you do with it?
Brooks: In our first year of graduate school,
a friend and I wrote a program to compose tunes.
The only large sample of tunes we had access to was
hymns, so we started generating common-meter hymns.
They were good enough that we could have palmed them
off to any choir.
It never surprises me when I learn that programmers
and computer scientists are first drawn to software
by a desire to implement creative and intelligent
tasks. Brooks was first drawn to computers by a
desire to automatic data retrieval, which at the
time must have seemed almost as fantastic as
composing music. In an Communications of the
ACM interview printed sometime last year, Ed
Feigenbaum called AI the "manifest destiny" of
computer science. I often think he is right. (I
hope to write about that interview soon, too.)
But that's not the only great passage in Brooks's
short interview. Consider:
Wired: You say that the Job Control Language
you developed for the IBM 360 OS was "the worst
computer programming language ever devised by
anybody, anywhere." Have you always been so frank
with yourself?
Brooks: You can learn more from failure than
success. In failure you're forced to find out what
part did not work. But in success you can believe
everything you did was great, when in fact some
parts may not have worked at all. Failure forces
you to face reality.
As an undergrad, I took a two-course sequence in
assembly language programming and JCL on an old
IBM 370 system. I don't know how much the
JCL
on that machine had advanced beyond Brooks's worst
computer programming language ever devised, if it
had at all. But I do know that the JCL course
gave me a
negative-split learning experience
unlike any I had ever had before or have had since.
As difficult as that was, I will be forever grateful
for Dr. William Brown, a veteran of the IBM 360/370
world, and what he taught me that year.
There are at least two more quotables from Brooks
that are worth hanging on my door some day:
Great design does not come from great processes;
it comes from great designers.
Hey to Steve Jobs.
The insight most likely to improve my own work
came next:
The critical thing about the design process is
to identify your scarcest resource.
This one line will keep me on my toes for many
projects to come.
If great design comes from great designers, then
how can the rest of us work toward the goal of
becoming a great designer, or at least a better
one?
Design, design, and design; and seek knowledgeable
criticism.
Practice, practice, practice.
But that probably won't be enough. Seek out
criticism from thoughtful programmers, designers,
and users. Listen to what they have to say, and
use it to improve your practice.
A good start might be to read this interview and
Brooks's books.
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