>
> On 10 Jan 2007, at 09:56, Nick Collins wrote:
>
>> But the solo or competitive coding situations still exist and I
>> think I naturally turn towards them, not because I'm unsympathetic
>> with the other roles, but because I'm genuinely curious about human
>> beings being pushed to the limits. Musicians often seek out the
>> states where they're on the edge and out of their comfort zone,
>> because those are the best learning experiences- and I think we
>> need many more high profile failures to learn our real limits, or
>> truly surprise ourselves with what we're capable.
>
> I completely agree with the spirit here of pushing the limits and
> embracing experimentation.
>
> Neither my QWERTY skills nor my brain equip me to do the kind of
> command line livecoding that I admire others for. However as a former
> musician (long time ago sadly) I can say that part of the point of
> practising performance is to disengage the consciousness of
> constructing or interpreting anything at all. Discussing what you
> find there is very difficult.
>
> I'd say though that anything that involves moving the brain and the
> hands at the same time would require at least 4 hours practise per
> day, 5 or six days per week. And you would only start to get
> disengaged after 2 or three years.
It's not quite the same thing, but I think there maybe some parallel with
normal coding practice here, the state of complete concentration while
programming, having to be disengaged from the rest of the world, losing
track of the time of day. This must be true of playing instruments too?
So to perform well, you have to be able to enter this state, and produce
results in a timeframe acceptable to an audience.
Unfortunately I don't think many languages are well designed for this. For
example, having to actively think about syntax is not coding - and is a
barrier to disengaging. At the right level it helps you, in that the
syntactic rules channel your thoughts into recognised patterns, once you
are familiar enough with a language for them to become second nature.
This knowledge comes with normal everyday programming, whether you do it
in a performative mode or not. Really livecoding practice is more about
accelerating and restricting yourself to things you know well (depending
on how confident you are).
I totally agree with Nick though, in that we have to have more failures, I
think I've been guilty of getting too conservative in my approach of late.
cheers,
dave
Received on Wed Jan 10 2007 - 12:04:57 GMT