Dear Log,
I was just answering someone's interview questions, which they asked of me for a book about writing CPAN modules. About the most profound thing I said was when I quoted Brian Eno (A Year with Swollen Appendices): "Try to make things that can become better in other people's minds than they were in yours". That certainly applies to me and the MIDI modules.
Other clever things I said:
«Programming is hard, and will not get easier, because programming is about thought and writing, and these are intractable issues, like trying to push water up-hill.»
«Programming is hard to even talk about, because it's very abstract, which makes it very hard at times to know if you're unknowingly misinterpreting what someone is saying.»
«The main worth of a module is that it does something useful. Suppose you need an algorithm implemented, and you check CPAN and can't find anything there, and so you go and read up on the problem and finally figure out it can be done in five lines of Perl. The fact that it's only a little code doesn't mean that you shouldn't put it in CPAN, even if the solution is "obvious" to you after you read up on the problem.»
«At all aspects of programming, you will get better with practice, whether you're aware of it or not.»
Yow! Am I a self-important
Re:Pragmatic Programmers
djberg96 on 2002-02-10T23:44:09
Dunno about software, but they did write the "Pick-Axe" book for Ruby ("Programming Ruby - The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide).If you want, you can ask them yourself. They're usually hanging out in comp.lang.ruby these days.
