Arie Peterson wrote:
More relevantly: again Dijkstra, but now on (programming as)
composing music:
"There are many different styles of composition. I characterize them
always as Mozart versus Beethoven. When Mozart began to write at that
time he had the composition ready in his mind. He wrote the
manuscript and it
was 'aus einem Guss' (casted as one). And it was also written very
beautiful. Beethoven was an indecisive and a tinkerer and wrote down
before he had the composition ready and plastered parts over to change
them. There was a certain place where he plastered over nine times
and one did remove that carefully to see what happened and it turned
out the last version was the same as the first one."
This seems to me the essential problem: that most programming books assume
the reader is divinely inspired like Mozart but the fact is that most of us
must struggle hard like Beethoven.
Programming is a *messy* activity, therefore what's needed is a book to tell
us how to turn lead into gold not just how to convert gold into syntax...
Regards, Brian.
--
http://www.metamilk.com
_______________________________________________
Haskell-Cafe mailing list
Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org
http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
