A Software Artist!
Filed Under (Subjective) by Mozammel on 21-08-2007
As agile development process is getting more and more popular, and software developers are increasingly using iterative process for their projects, I sometime wonder where does the thin line between an artist and an engineer gets blurred.
An artist may have some tools at his disposal, like a blank canvas, some colors, and brushes, but with a brilliant mental picture of his final art. Interestingly, how much different is the situation from having a blank IDE, some yammy APIs, compilers, and the larger view of the system to develop?
An artist does some sketches - does the base painting, and then follows several ‘iterations’ to get to his final creation, until he gets to the point of his satisfaction and completes his task with the final touch ups. Do you see the dazzling resemblance with the iterative model we follow in software development now a days?
We sometime wonder why the Computer Science fresh grads don’t produce beautiful codes. But how many times in a student’s undergrad life did s/he try to grasp the beauty of a production standard, well tested code? How many times did the professors in our classes taught (or at least generated interest in) us the architectural marvels of a wonderfully designed framework?
In other disciplines (architecture, photography, art) students learn by looking at the examples of design wonders. We should also make it a practice in CS, so that we learn to appreciate the beauty of codes at an early stage.