[Xmca-l] Re: The power of Humanities in a recursive loop

[Greg Mcverry]

Ed,

Sorry to keep spamming the thread with my rants from all over the web but I
agree with you on sketching. There is something about thinking on paper as
a tool that allows my mind to solve problems better than a keyboard.

This was a comment I made to someone bemoaning the loss of physical
typography:
https://medium.com/@jgmac1106/why-has-this-stopped-a303b42cebc6#.1vtz1rlau

On Mon, May 23, 2016 at 4:07 PM Ed Wall <ewall@umich.edu> wrote:

> All
>
>      Although I have been known to pour paint thinner down the toilet, I
> much approve of Annalisa’s solution (unfortunately there are no water
> quality people around here).
>
>       Insofar as coding goes, I did, perhaps, learn to code by means other
> than strictly copying or pasting. However, oddly enough, I began with
> sketching - I needed to do this for a programmer who did work for me from
> time to time - and, when he was busy, I found myself translating the sketch
> into pseudo-code and later into code. Nonetheless, it is as Greg may be
> saying, you build-on /copy/paste others’ insights. Even original coding
> does that and I have written operating systems, compliers, games, etc.
>       Anyway, Annalisa’s point of beginning with sketching is a very good
> idea. Then when you have a sort of idea of what you want to happen you need
> to learn how to force whatever system of coding you are using to implement
> the sketch. There are people who don’t need to do this, but they probably
> wrote the system you are using out of a particular need of their own.
> Finally, you need to think like a computer; i.e.. dumb! This is probably
> the most important characteristic a good coder has. He or she knows how to
> think dumb.
>      People have tried to take the ‘coding’ out and leave the sketching
> in. That works well for simple applications - see, for example, the
> community version of LiveCode. However, it doesn’t work too well for
> something interesting. The history of computer languages provides, by the
> way, a rather fascinating picture of attempts to capture aspects of human
> rationality and some of the more interesting attempts you could say were
> non-STEM.
>
> Ed
>
> > On May 23, 2016, at  2:27 PM, Greg Mcverry <jgregmcverry@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > However coding should not be a social-darwinist experiment, which tends
> to
> > be the case because code interpreters are ruthless syntactic stalinists.
> >
> > I think this is  a stereotype, a specialized set of discourse practices,
> > and a reflection of gender inequity among coders.
> >
> > Nobody learns to code. You can just copy and paste better than the next
> > gal. It takes a long time to generate original code.
> >
> > I am a self taught....actually community taught...the auto-didactic coder
> > is a myth. I have been involved in a variety of open source projects in
> the
> > last few years as a non-technical contributor.
> >
> > Yet every project I get involved in, I learn a little bit more. Right now
> > its just html/css/javascript but its always a little bit more than I knew
> > yesterday.
> >
> > There are amazing and really inclusive places to reach out and learn how
> to
> > code or markup webpages.
> >
> > On Mon, May 23, 2016 at 3:21 PM Annalisa Aguilar <annalisa@unm.edu>
> wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> Thanks Martin and Greg,
> >>
> >> Um... first things first. I never do the paint thinner down the toilet
> >> thing. I actually make an appointment with the waste management
> department
> >> on Saturdays and drive it in. Do they not have such a thing for you,
> Martin?
> >>
> >> And, I love your poem Greg. Just because computers "think"
> algorithmically
> >> doesn't mean we do. Humans first! :) And Humanities first (too!)
> >>
> >> As much as code is a stinky affair for some of us non-STEMers, there is
> >> something to be said of occupying the codebases. I don't mean github or
> >> reddit, as I'm not a masochist.
> >>
> >> However coding should not be a social-darwinist experiment, which tends
> to
> >> be the case because code interpreters are ruthless syntactic
> stalinists. I
> >> myself have tried to teach myself to code more times than I can count,
> and
> >> it still eludes me! If I had the right teacher, I'd do some great things
> >> with code. I think it's because of my system-thinking (top-down rather
> than
> >> bottom up) that it eludes me. You can't sketch with code, and then fill
> in
> >> the lines (or can you?) I sense, if I were to learn to code, I'd become
> a
> >> dialectic coder.
> >>
> >> Is there such a thing?
> >>
> >> Kind recursions,
> >>
> >> Annalisa
> >>
> >>
> >>
>
>
>