TITLE: The Flip Side to "Programming for All"
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: July 27, 2015 2:23 PM
DESC:
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BODY:
We all hear the common refrain these days that more people should
learn to program, not just CS majors. I agree. If you know how
to program, you can make things. Even if you don't write many
programs yourself, you are better prepared to talk to the
programmers who make things for you. And even if you don't need
to talk to programmers, you have expanded your mind a bit to a way
of thinking that is changing the world we live in.
But there are two sides to this equation, as Chris Crawford laments
in his essay,
Fundamentals of Interactivity:
Why is it that our entertainment software has such primitive
algorithms in it? The answer lies in the people creating
them. The majority are programmers. Programmers aren't
really idea people; they're technical people. Yes, they use
their brains a great deal in their jobs. But they don't
live in the world of ideas. Scan a programmer's bookshelf
and you'll find mostly technical manuals plus a handful of
science fiction novels. That's about the extent of their
reading habits. Ask a programmer about Rabelais, Vivaldi,
Boethius, Mendel, Voltaire, Churchill, or Van Gogh, and
you'll draw a blank. Gene pools? Grimm's Law? Gresham's
Law? Negentropy? Fluxions? The mind-body problem? Most
programmers cannot be troubled with such trivia. So how can
we expect them to have interesting ideas to put into their
algorithms? The result is unsurprising: the algorithms in
most entertainment products are boring, predictable,
uninformed, and pedestrian. They're about as interesting
in conversation as the programmers themselves.
We do have some idea people working on interactive entertainment;
more of them show up in multimedia than in games. Unfortunately,
most of the idea people can't program. They refuse to learn the
technology well enough to express themselves in the language of
the medium. I don't understand this cruel joke that Fate has
played upon the industry: programmers have no ideas and idea
people can't program. Arg!
My office bookshelf occasionally elicits a comment or two from
first-time visitors, because even here at work I have a complete
works of Shakespeare, a thin volume of William Blake (I love me
some Blake!), several philosophy books, and "The Brittanica Book
of Usage". I really should have some Voltaire here, too. I do
cover one of Crawford's bases: a recent blog entry made
a software analogy to Gresham's Law.
In general, I think you're more likely to find a computer scientist
who knows some literature than you are to find a literary
professional who knows much CS. That's partly an artifact of our
school system and partly a result of the wider range historically
of literature and the humanities. It's fun to run into a colleague
from across campus who has read deeply in some area of science or
math, but rare.
However, we are all prone to fall into the chasm of our own
specialties and miss out on the well-roundedness that makes us
better at whatever specialty we practice. That's one reason that,
when high school students and their parents ask me what students
should take to prepare for a CS major, I tell them: four years of
all the major subjects, including English, math, science, social
science, and the arts; plus whatever else interests them, because
that's often where they will learn the most. All of these topics
help students to become better computer scientists, and better
people.
And, not surprisingly, better game developers. I agree with
Crawford that more programmers should be learn enough other stuff
to be idea people, too. Even if they don't make games.
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