TITLE: Teaching Programming Versus Teaching Art AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: July 27, 2016 10:58 AM DESC: ----- BODY: Like many people, I am fond of analogies between software development and arts like writing and painting. It's easy to be seduced by similarities even when the daily experiences of programmers and artists are often so different. For that reason, I was glad that this statement by sculptor Jacques Lipschutz stood out in such great relief from the text around it:

Teaching is death. If he teaches, the sculptor has to open up and reveal things that should be closed and sacred.

For me, teaching computer science has been just the opposite. Teaching forces me to open up my thinking processes. It encourages me to talk with professional developers about how they do what they do and what they think about along the way. Through these discussions, we do reveal things that sometimes feel almost sacred, but I think we all benefit from the examination. It not only helps me to teach novice developers more effectively; it also helps me to be a better programmer myself. ~~~~ (The Lipschutz passage comes from Conversations with Artists, which I quoted for the first time last week.) -----