> On 7/6/06, Adrian Ward <signwave-adrian_at_signwave.co.uk> wrote:
>> It's a shame the anger isn't directed at the tabloid journalism that
>> generates these sorts of stories. The article is full of inaccuracies,
>> misrepresentations and is, at best, one person's glossy intepretation of
>> something more substantial than the populist agenda it is pushing. I
>> suspect if the general Wired readership were aware of this such comments
>> wouldn't be so strong.
>>
>
> I posted links to the article on a few fora because it seemed like a
> better introduction then most, then I chanced upon some other
> discussions.
>
> The idea that livecoders are "accedemic" or "showing off" seems quite
> popular. I found that a bit odd; the big central texts on livecoding
> tend to place a lot of emphasis on getting drunk in clubs, we poke a
> lot of fun at ourselves too; the average discussion on the virtues of
> groveboxes place less emhasis on the posibility of laptop crashes then
> we do.
>
> What I suspect we are dealing with isn't all that interesting even
> from a cultural or artistic perspective (with all due respect to the
> interesting texts some people write). I think we are dealing with
> human nature, I think many of those comenting feel slightly
> intimidated. Programing has a reputation of being "hard", I think many
> people believe it's too hard for them and get the subconcious urge to
> hide this and thus attack their source of insecurity.
>
> If I'm right and we would like livecoding to become more popular and
> less preceived as a elitist thing I think more emphasis should be
> placed on how accessible it can be.
Yes, I think we are sorely lacking in this area. It's hard though -
programming has such a stigma, as you say, that it's difficult to convince
people that it has a place in their life (even though it's hard to find
someone who has never run a program these days).
One of the most rewarding aspects of livecoding for me is that you can use
it to explain what programming is and what you do with it, to people who
would not normally take the time to find out. The live aspect means that
they can see mistakes and disasters happen and it becomes obvious that you
don't have to be insanely clever to do this (or if you do, we certainly
aren't).
Coming back to the article, I do think a good protection against people
getting the wrong idea from TOPLAP is to make it completely ridiculous.
cheers,
dave
Received on Tue Jul 18 2006 - 16:37:14 BST