TITLE: In Praise of Usefulness
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: September 04, 2011  7:28 PM
DESC: 
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In two recent entries [
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2011-08.html#e2011-08-26T14_29_59.htm">
   1</A>
|
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2011-08.html#e2011-08-27T09_36_20.htm">
   2</A>
], I mentioned that I had been recently reading Roger Rosenblatt's
<EM>Unless It Moves the Human Heart: The Craft and Art of Writing</EM>.
Many of you indulge me my fascination with writers talking about
writing, and I often see parallels between what writers of code
and writers of prose and poetry do.  That Rosenblatt also connects
writing to teaching, another significant theme of my blog, only
makes this book more stimulating to me.

"Unless it moves the human heart" is the sort of thing writers say
about their calling, but not something many programmers say.  (The
book title quotes Aussie poet A. D. Hope.)  It is clearly at the
heart of Rosenblatt's views of writing and teaching.  But in his
closing chapter, Rosenblatt includes a letter written to his
students as a postscript on his course that speaks to a desire
most programmers have for the lives' work: usefulness.  To be
great, he says, your writing must be useful to the world.  The
fiction writer's sense of utility may differ from the programmer's,
but at one level the two share an honorable motive.

This paragraph grabbed me as advice as important for us programmers
as it is for creative programmers.  (Which software people do you
think of as you read it?)

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
How can you know what is useful to the world?  The world will not
tell you.  The world will merely let you know what it wants, which
changes from moment to moment, and is nearly always cockeyed.  You
cannot allow yourself to be directed by its tastes.  When a writer
wonders, "Will it sell?" he is lost, not because he is looking to
make an extra buck or two, but rather because, by dint of asking
the question in the first place, he has oriented himself to the
expectations of others.  The world is not a focus group.  The
world is an appetite waiting to be defined.  The greatest love you
can show it is to create what it needs, which means you must know
that yourself.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

What a brilliant sentence: <B>The world is an appetite waiting to
be defined</B>.  I don't think Ward Cunningham went around asking
people if they needed wiki.  He built it and gave it to them, and
when they saw it, their appetite took form.  It is indeed a great
form of love to create what the world needs,
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2004-11.html#e2004-11-22T09_45_54.htm">
   whether the people know it yet or not</A>.

(I imagine that at least a few of you were thinking of Steve Jobs
and the vision that gave us the Mac, iTunes, and the iPad.  I was
too, though Ward has always been my hero when it comes to making
useful things I had not anticipated.)

Rosenblatt tells his students that, to write great stories and
poems and essays, they need to know the world well and deeply.
This is also sound advice to programmers, especially those who
want to start the next great company or revolutionize their
current employers from the inside out.  This is another good
reason to
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2011-06.html#e2011-06-17T12_28_19.htm">
   read, study, and think broadly</A>.
To know the world outside of one's Ruby interpreter, outside the
Javascript spec and the HTML 5.0, one must live in it and think
about it.

It seems fitting on this Labor Day weekend for us to think about
all the people who make the world we live in and keep it running.
Increasingly, those people are using -- and writing -- software
to give us useful things.
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