Some time ago I read about a study of people's perception of Coolness in Scientific American. It turns out that people differ as to how people perceive things as cool, according to brain scans. Some people consider coolness to be the lack of uncool things. Others see coolness as something different which remains cool even if a few uncool things are mixed in.
Being a professional programmer, however, one has to accept that whatever the client wants or needs is cool. Criticism at the level of what they want, what they think they need, is likely unhelpful (unless…see below). So the best one can do is provide the second of coolness, to add some coolness in. That's natural for me because I'm a second kind of coolness guy. Though it may not be natural for everyone.
The exception may be if you are large enough. Both IBM in their early mainframe heyday (50's to 70's) and Apple are large enough and influential enough that they can make their Cool the only Cool. Any presence of inferior coolness throws the whole game. So you get the complete IBM or Apple package…don't try to mix in other people's products (like Corel Wordperfect) because they don't get it like we do.
So there we see the madness to the method. The first kind of coolness is useful if you have a monopoly on the truth. And it gives such shakers the ability to monopolize a market. And that usually requires sufficient clout: bigness, intellectual presence, chutzpah. IBM and Apple could get away with it and make more truth, etc.
Joe Programmer shouldn't try--he hasn't got the resources. But many have tried, backed by the latest words from IBM, Apple, or Wirth.
There are still a lot of lack-of-coolness buzzwords in programming. For example, Fortran is old fashioned (actually, Fortran is cool in many ways, and the newest Fortran standards continue to be updated), command line interfaces are uncool (actually, they are now pretty universally recognized as the best interfaces for certain activities…especially technical ones like programming and also science…GUI interfaces turn out to be comparatively inflexible and unadaptable as well as the long standing criticism that they don't shortcut or script as well).
And then there's the never ending war of computer languages. Face it, every computer language is cool in some way… The very idea of a programming language is mighty cool.
Being a professional programmer, however, one has to accept that whatever the client wants or needs is cool. Criticism at the level of what they want, what they think they need, is likely unhelpful (unless…see below). So the best one can do is provide the second of coolness, to add some coolness in. That's natural for me because I'm a second kind of coolness guy. Though it may not be natural for everyone.
The exception may be if you are large enough. Both IBM in their early mainframe heyday (50's to 70's) and Apple are large enough and influential enough that they can make their Cool the only Cool. Any presence of inferior coolness throws the whole game. So you get the complete IBM or Apple package…don't try to mix in other people's products (like Corel Wordperfect) because they don't get it like we do.
So there we see the madness to the method. The first kind of coolness is useful if you have a monopoly on the truth. And it gives such shakers the ability to monopolize a market. And that usually requires sufficient clout: bigness, intellectual presence, chutzpah. IBM and Apple could get away with it and make more truth, etc.
Joe Programmer shouldn't try--he hasn't got the resources. But many have tried, backed by the latest words from IBM, Apple, or Wirth.
There are still a lot of lack-of-coolness buzzwords in programming. For example, Fortran is old fashioned (actually, Fortran is cool in many ways, and the newest Fortran standards continue to be updated), command line interfaces are uncool (actually, they are now pretty universally recognized as the best interfaces for certain activities…especially technical ones like programming and also science…GUI interfaces turn out to be comparatively inflexible and unadaptable as well as the long standing criticism that they don't shortcut or script as well).
And then there's the never ending war of computer languages. Face it, every computer language is cool in some way… The very idea of a programming language is mighty cool.
No comments:
Post a Comment