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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Another mutated variant of the 'PowerPoint makes yo udumb
 Drummers and bass players are semi-sentient vegetables. They don't program well. ;-) Music is programming and that is why it analogizes so well to computer geekery. History teaches analytical skills for human contexts and that analogizes well to the kinds of analysis one does when creating production-worthy systems. Lawyers know where the money is. At the end of the day, programming isn't that hard to learn and law is. One sees many 12 year old kids programming and few practicing law. Most of the spectacular failures of the computing industry involved designers so absorbed in the depths of set theory, turing machines, the perfect one pass parse, who can write the fastest algorithm, and so on that they forget that humans create, use and pay for the information. The spectacular winning technologies make it easier for them to do that even if it costs the programmer some time in machine cycles or skateboarding. Powerpoint makes it easy to produce a decent looking presentation. It can't make a dumb author smarter but it won't make a smart audience dumber. It might bore them but not as much as bad phrasing and a whiny or monotone voice. XML makes life easier for programmers and harder for humans. That is why it is a technology in search of a human audience. It made the programmers feel smarter and the user interface feel dumber. len From: Bob Wyman [mailto:bob@w...] Claude L. Bullard wrote: > The best grounding, IMO, for programming if nothing > else is provided is symbolic logic. Otherwise, > history and music. I remember reading a research paper many years ago that discussed this subject. The curious thing was that they claimed that not all music was a good background for programming. The claim was that people that played woodwinds and strings ended up being better at coding then others. Percussionists were at the bottom of the list as well as some of the brass instruments (including Tuba -- which was my instrument...) An attempt was made in the paper to explain the difference. The best explanation they could come up with was based on the idea that the woodwinds, etc. had to deal with shorter notes and thus had to have a deeper appreciation of the pattern, system or complexity of the music than those who played instruments which focused on longer notes. This paper was a long time ago, so don't ask me for more details... Something that I've noticed over the years is that the programming business has a lot of ex-lawyers in it. Many of the ones that I've worked with have been among the best coders I've known... bob wyman 
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