On Tue, 2006-09-05 at 18:16 +0200, Till Bovermann wrote:
> concerning the main discussion:
> I think one really important factor differentiating playing a guitar
> or a programming language is flow as Csikszentmihalyi [1] defines it.
> ATM we are not able to get into a flow within programming; results
> are still too far away...
Only if you maintain a view of flow as being entirely human, of course
in that case it will never match with livecoding which has both a human
and machine agents/actions.
If you view livecoding as symbiotic between man and machine then the
machine can achieve flow on one level (execution) and the human the
other (abstract concepts). Indeed machines maintain many components of
flow at all times by default - clear goals, focus, no
self-consciousness, immediate feedback.
I also think you're assuming that achieving flow requires tangible
results and interaction with the outside world. Of course humans are
able to achieve flow while for example writing a novel, because the
novel is developing in their heads as well as the page they do not have
to wait until they've finished writing a chapter before intertwining it
with the next... When they eventually execute a chapter as a whole (by
reading it back) they may well find it ended up evoking something quite
different to how they imagined it to be, and may also find grammar
(syntax) errors that need correcting. It's the same with programming.
More simply, based on my own experience, I simply do not believe that it
is not possible for a programmer to become productively lost in their
code.
alex
Received on Tue Sep 05 2006 - 16:34:12 BST