Submitted by Morbus Iff on Sat, 2008-06-21 12:07
Friend Mark Bernstein promotes "software as craft" with the phrase NeoVictorian Computing. Jeremy recalls that "Part of his argument is that software creators have something to learn from the ideals of the arts and crafts movement: the software world is full of soulless bits and bytes, and maybe we would all be a little happier if we embraced handcraft ... During the talk, I remember Bernstein proposed that software creators should sign their work as a painter signs a painting, which is a lovely visual metaphor that I hope to keep around." And Greg Wilson has a book called Beautiful Code.
Happily, I already agree - they're all echoes of my own belief in "code shui", be it XML (a Morbus Rant from 2002 on "why beauty is important in computer file formats") or in code from 2004 ("His style is quite unique. [Morbus' AmphetaDesk] source reads almost like a paper, instead of terse code. He documents his code well and I've thus far found nothing that was very hard to understand. Best of all, its so un-Perl. He doesn't seem to use really clever tricks to do simple things, so the code has been very easy to understand").
