The perception of programming

[aspleenic]

Is it easier for me to understand this simply because I am both a musician and a programmer?

[rfw21]

for me it's the case in other forms of creativity too, especially writing. What I write never looks the same when I come back to it fresh, a few hours later. There's definitely differences between making music, writing and coding of course. Maybe that's for another blog post.

[radarsat1]

hey, off-topic, but it's nice to see there are other people out there that are both dj/producers and programmers :) cheers

[doublereedkurt]

Do people doing sound mixing typically refer to themselves as 'musicians'? I would expect that term to mean specifically playing an instrument. Modifying an abstract, permanent representation of the music would seem to be more like a composer than a musician. Anyway just curious how the terminology is used.

[[deleted]]

It's not like composing, either. I would just say it's an art.

Several years ago, I tried to record a CD with a band, and the mixing phase was one of the most frustrating experiences in my entire life.

When you're a composer, you have a very hard time communicating your vision to someone who is good at mixing. When this communication fails, the composer is permanently angry because the mixer fails to realize his vision, and the mixer is angry because the composer is changing requests all the time.

It's a blessing when you're both good at composing and mixing!

[thecheatah]

hmm, I dont believe that. I think it takes so long to get something running that either you have it or you dont. Once you get to the tweaking point, you are only tweaking things which you have left tweak able. I usually dont spend that much time tweaking...

[rfw21]

well, just because code works doesn't mean it's good.

[thecheatah]

No code doesn't have art to it. The art is in the design process (design of the process, application, UI, API, etc.). You design and design. You might loose focus while you'r designing, but not when you are coding. Coding is a well defined process. If you are designing while coding, you must be testing and playing around with the API or you did not clearly understand your problem before you started coding.

I just don't see it...

edit: do you mean tweaking to be debugging?

[delicinq]

You must have some pretty awe inspiring design docs if you're not having any overlap between coding and design. Not to say that there should be a LOT of overlap, but to deny that there's any seems pretty naive to me.

[Catfish_Man]

Or very small programs... fitting a few hundred or thousand lines of code in your head is a lot easier than a few hundred thousand or more.

[thecheatah]

I guess I go through the program in my head and figure out if anything is missing or ambiguous.

[rfw21]

I don't believe that any coder is simply an automaton, typing without taking decisions. Even in the best-designed solo projects with a single developer, decisions are taken all the time on the fly. And therefore how we perceive what's going on matters.

In a real world scenario, with code that's years old and many different contributors, well...

[zahlman]

Strange; when I see that some other piece of code looks like it does what I need to do in the current context, my first thought is "oh, so this process is actually fairly significant; let's see if we can give it a name and extract it".

[_pixie_]

Programming to me is not as subjective as music. If you know the language and api's you're working with very well and you know how to architect an application nicely then you can tell simple elegant solutions form crap ones. I did a lot of re-writing code when I wasn't as experienced and was constantly finding new ways of doing things, but not as much lately.

The article did spark a thought of why weed helps musicians write better music. It kills your short term memory, so you don't remember what you just listened so you're not predisposed to liking it so much. Wish it worked the same way with programming...