[P]atience is just another word for "let's make it someone else's problem. ... Expectations count too. If you have patience, and no expectations, you get nothing.But what if you find the available tools lacking and want something better? Scientists often face this situation. My physicist friends seem always to be rigging up some new apparatus in order to run the experiments they want to run. For scientists and so many other people these days, though, if they want a new kind of tool, they have to write a computer program. Butterick tells a story that shows designers can do the same:
Let's talk about type-design tools. If you've been at the conference [TYPO Berlin, 2012], maybe you saw Petr van Blokland and Frederick Berlaen talking about RoboFont yesterday. But that is the endpoint of a process that started about 15 years ago when Erik and Petr van Blokland, and Just van Rossum (later joined by many others) were dissatisfied with the commercial type-design tools. So they started building their own. And now, that's a whole ecosystem of software that includes code libraries, a new font-data format called UFO, and applications. And these are not hobbyist applications. These are serious pieces of software being used by professional type designers.That is fifteen years of patience. But it is also patience and expectation in action. To my mind, this is the real goal of teaching more people how to program: programmers don't have to settle. Authors and web designers create beautiful, functional works. They shouldn't have to settle for boring or cliché type on the web, in their ebooks, or anywhere else. They can make better. Butterick illustrates this approach to design himself with Pollen, his software for writing and publishing books. Pollen is a testimonial to the power of programming for authors (as well as a public tribute to the expressiveness of a programming language). Empowering professionals to make better tools is a first step, but it isn't enough. Until programming as a skill becomes part of the culture of a discipline, better tools will not always be used to their full potential. Butterick gives an example:What makes all of this work so remarkable is that there are no professional software engineers here. There's no corporation behind it all. It's a group of type designers who saw what they needed, so they built it. They didn't rely on patience. They didn't wait for someone else to fix their problems. They relied on their expectations. The available tools weren't good enough. So they made better.
... I was speaking to a recent design-school graduate. He said, "Hey, I design fonts." And I said, "Cool. What are you doing with RoboFab and UFO and Python?" And he said, "Well, I'm not really into programming." That strikes me as a really bad attitude for a recent graduate. Because if type designers won't use the tools that are out there and available, type design can't make any progress. It's as if we've built this great spaceship, but none of the astronauts want to go to Mars. "Well, Mars is cool, but I don't want to drive a spaceship. I like the helmet, though." Don't be that guy. Go the hell to Mars.Don't be that person. Go to Mars. While you are at it, help the people you know to see how much fun programming can be and, more importantly, how it can help them make things better. They can expect more. -----