On Wed, 2004-10-27 at 15:11, Dave Griffiths wrote:
> I like visualisations of processes, I think the process is the thing of
> value, as you can write a bubble sort in any language under the sun -
> it's the process of it being carried out that's cool, surely?
>
> Ok, am I wrong? Is a bubble sort more interesting/have more value
> written as perl, or ZX80 asm, or whitespace? Is your descision based
> more on the characters used to describe the same algorithm? If this is
> the case, then why bother running it? :/
Well if two people were to make a bubblesort then visualise it in the
same way, then I bet it would look different, I still think the detail
is in the implementation. Which direction do you travel in? Where do
you restart from? What state do you keep, and how do you know where
your work is done as a result? The bubblesort is a well-defined
algorithm but still, I remember having to make decisions when I was
programming them in college. Sometimes this detail seems more important
to me than the algorithm itself.
Through live coding practice, I find myself recoding the same ideas or
algorithms over and over again, but still they come out different every
time.
In practice I bother running my code because while I will have an idea
of it in my head, I don't know what it's going to do in the real world.
I run the code, see the results, change the code and repeat. Live
coding makes this action and reaction immediate. This is not a process
of debugging (a well practiced programmer doesn't spend their time
clearing up after bum notes), it's a process of authorship through
manipulation of code.
alex
Received on Wed Oct 27 2004 - 22:47:44 BST