NeoVictorian Computing

[Perry Winkle]

This is kind of interesting.

Approaching whatever you do as craft is fun. It's liberating.

For the first couple of years that I worked for a software development house, I had a blast. As the culture of the place I worked changed, and as I began doing more client-driven work, my joyfulness at work decreased drastically.

[DanaC]

Thanks for the link Perry. My ex is doing a 'design for computer games' degree at the moment. I have an interest in online gaming (mmorpg mainly) in particular where it's been and where it's going. I get the sense that computing as art is something that is just on the cusp of really growing up.

I'm going to pass this along to J, I think he'll find some stuff in there that'll resonate.

[Bitman]

I found it hard to read the whole thing.

we expect to do too little

Way off. Way off. Zonbu will sell you a tiny computer containing all the software you expect a modern machine to support. Modern games have so many missions that it takes days to play the "core" game and weeks to work though all the other missions. Buy an Apple Mac, and you get two dual-layer DVDs (roughtly 16GB total) with pre-installed and optional software.

We should expect to learn

Already do. Eclipse has so many APIs that it's hard to keep up. Actually that true of Java (and dot-net, I assume) in general.

Users and software designers should embrace personality and style

Software designers are engineers, and by definition have no style. This isn't an insult; I program for the logical fun, not the creative freedom. And even worse, software with too much style becomes hard to use.

We should accept failure

Why? We don't accept it anywhere else. What happens when your car breaks? Your faucet? A wrench?

British railroads went bankrupt building the rail system they wanted

20/20 hindsight. Intel fell into the same trap trying to build a high-gigahertz low-efficiency chip. They failed; AMD ate their lunch with high-efficiency low-speed chips. And Intel's new chip is both high-speed and high-efficiency. I can't tell if there's a lesson in this, except maybe the one from Extreme Programming: only solve the problems you actually have.

Our hardware is in constant transition, our software paradigms are broken. Well engineered software isn't flexible; flexible software breaks your customizations with the next release. These problems are being solved, and the solutions introduce more problems.

I can't figure out what the moral to all this is. But this article is nowhere as deep as it seems.

[toranokaze]

They keep talking about showing the parts, and other metaphors but no examples.