On Wed, 2006-09-06 at 15:45 -0400, mcburton wrote:
> Muscle Memory is a term I remember hearing frequently as a
> justification for "practice." Be it playing soccer or playing piano,
> the point of the practice was to train the subconscious parts of our
> brain to react (or cause our body to react) in a certain way. I
> believe it is the ability to "push down" (in the cognitive sense) the
> act of playing an instrument to lower levels of conciseness that
> enables virtuosity. Active consciousness is slow. The notion of
> "being in the zone" for physical endeavors such as sports or playing
> an instrument is similar to the "flow" we describe when programming.
> Our hands certainly can become accustomed to typing certain patterns (
> hammering out System.out.println without even thinking....) but this
> "muscle memory" is just language syntax. Do our hands have the
> ability to store actual algorithms? That is to say, can we actually
> train our subconscious to react to a situation with certain
> algorithms? Perhaps an efficient syntax would enable more direct
> access to this Muscle Memory....
I haven't kept up with all this thread, but some thoughts...
I can't play a musical instrument, but I can say that the feeling of
livecoding is a similar feeling to painting or drawing a picture for me.
It does seem slightly stranger in this context to me to do this in front
of an audience - as it would to paint a picture in front of the audience
- but where code differs from paint is that it forms processes that can
react quickly and self modify, so maybe it's more like some form of
sculpture or improvised architecture. This is quite different in my mind
to how traditional musical instruments work, and I'm not sure that it's
desirable that they are seen to be similar.
As far as muscle memory goes - I do feel that languages are too brittle
and unforgiving for the use we are putting them to for livecoding - one
of the reasons I became interested in scheme is that it reduces syntax
down to an absolute minimum. It's for similar reasons I've been playing
with greatly simplified virtual machines, in the case of betablocker,
that there is no simply no syntax at all. It might be possible to code
it drunk, which of course is my secret goal.
cheers,
dave
Received on Wed Sep 06 2006 - 21:57:03 BST