By Erik Gfesser — Jan 10, 2015

Strange Loop 2014:Keynote: Our Shared Joy of Programming

September 19, 2014: 4:50 PM – 5:30 PM

From the promotional materials:

Our Shared Joy of Programming

Have you ever had flying dreams? Or dreams that all of a sudden you finally understood it “all”? These feelings are echoed in the joy we experience in learning, discovering, and creating as software developers. This talk will explore and celebrate this precious and fragile joy. We will look at ways to enhance it and avoid things that threaten to squash it. In particular, we see how it binds us all together as a community and how we can nurture it in each other.

Carin Meier (Outpace): Carin started off as a professional ballet dancer, studied Physics in college, and has been developing software for both the enterprise and entrepreneur ever since. She has a thing for Clojure and can be usually found with a cup of tea in her hand, hacking on her Roomba and AR Parrot Drone.

Sam Aaron (University of Cambridge): Sam is a live coder and strongly believes in the importance of emphasising and exploring and celebrating creativity within all aspects of programming. He is the lead developer of Overtone a live coding music environment in Clojure, Quil a Clojure front-end to Processing and Sonic Pi a beginners music live coding environment used to teach programming within schools. Sam is also one half of the live coding duo Meta-eX.

My personal notes:

Many of you reading this post have probably either read the classic text written by Frederick P Brooks Jr called "The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering", or come across it at some point in your careers. As I mentioned in my review of the book, a professor recommended the book to students of a course I took a number of years ago.

While I am not sure how often this book is still recommended in undergraduate or graduate computer science coursework, the book has stuck with me because of its timeless advice, and although many now enter the field without formal educations, classics such as this are really invaluable to the field, and I recommend adding it to your reading list.

One particular passage called "The Joys of the Craft" that has especially stuck with me was mentioned in my review several years ago of a book by Donald E. Knuth entitled "Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About", and it was this passage that immediately came to mind at the start of the talk:

Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward?

First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God's delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness and newness of each leaf and each snowflake.

Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and to find it helpful. In this respect the programming system is not essentially different from the child's first clay pencil holder "for Daddy's office."

Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate.

Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task. In one way or another the problem is ever new, and its solver learns something: sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both.

Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. (As we shall see later, this very tractability has its own problems.)

Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.

Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men.

Note that a passaged entitled "The Woes of the Craft" immediately follows, but I will leave it to you to discover on your own.

Readers of this blog might recall my original Strange Loop 2014 post on session planning for the event, which listed this session last. Of the scheduled keynotes, this was by far the most entertaining, and it was a great way to end the conference.

Work colleagues and I have periodically discussed the vacuum which exists in the media with regard to accurate representations of software development, and it would be of benefit to the industry if this session reached a broader audience.

"Do you like it?" and "Isn't that boring?" are some questions that are often raised to Meier when meeting someone new and she is asked what she does for a living
when she replies by saying that she loves software development, the typical response is "Why?" Personally, this reminded me of the movie "Run Fatboy Run", in which the protagonist is repeatedly asked the same question when he says that he runs
she often responds with a question: "Have you ever had flying dreams?"
it is what the speaker feels like when she is in the zone coding
"Have you ever had one of those dreams where you finally understood it all, even if you forget it when you wake up?"
this is the way she feels when she finally understands a programming problem
and if the individual with whom Meier is speaking still experiences confusion, or they have not dropped the discussion yet at this point, she shares a story from childhood
there was a grove of trees to which she rode her bicycle, which seemed magical to her
she was utterly conviced that at any moment she would see a unicorn
this is the same awe and wonder that she feels when exporing a new technology
the personal joy of programming is fragile, you need to take care of it, because it can be diminished to the point that it feels like it will disappear
fortunately, there are some safeguards to maintain your joy
take care of yourself, especially after a conference such as this
get enough sleep, eat good food, exercise
keep interested, keep learning, keep that flame alive
for Meier, her passion is Clojure
one night while she was first started playing with Clojure by programming a quad copter, which took off for the first time, she screamed "OMG it worked!" and felt like she was flying with the drone

at this point, Meier mentioned that what she had discussed thus far are factors which are under one's control
unfortunately, life happens, sickness happens
Meier lost a good friend and colleague this past Spring, and she was devastated
joy left, and her passion for Clojure was just no longer there anymore
while she knew this was a normal part of the grieving process, it was still very hard
one night, she was trying out a Clojure library called Overtone, which creates music with code
Meier cannot read music and has never played a musical instrument
but somehow with overtone, she was able to make sounds, and even music, and the joy returned to her – the shared joy of the community
Overtone is open source software created by Jeff Rose and Sam Aaron
the song that Meier finally managed to play is by Daft Punk, and getting to that point made her laugh and cry at the same time
the fact that that she was experiencing the joy of the community was especially fitting because she had been grieving for Jim Weirich, creator of Rake, who loved music and spoke at Strange Loop 2012
Meier commented that Weirich was always filled with joy, full of wonder and excitement for new things
Weirich shared his joy through open source software, teaching, speaking all over the world, and inspiring others
he was a true caretaker of this shared joy of the community, always treating others with kindess and respect, and there were never any stupid questions with him regardless of whether you were a programmer
our shared joy increases our personal joy, binds us as a community, lifts us up, and makes us more than ourselves

at this point, Sam Aaron took the stage
a lot of his joy of programming comes from other people using the software that he wrote – it inspires him to carry on
one of the main things that Aaron communicates is the creativity that is part of the programming process
coding is so much more than apps and websites, which provides much of our employment as professionals
what could it be? it could be a new way to interact with music
Aaron is part of the live coding duo Meta-eX
what Meta-eX tries to communicate is the exciting things that can be done through programming – not just to programmers, but everybody else, since most people do not understand, or think programming is boring
this is a way to share the joy of programming by inspiring other people with what can be done
but it is not something that they can do now, so the path to get there needs to be easier
the Raspberry Pi folks asked if Aaron could do something for their platform
after porting Overtone to the Raspberry Pi, Aaron was faced with the fact that it took 7 minutes to boot up
so he did a lot of rewriting, all the while thinking about its usage in the classroom
in other words, making it easy to use while also being able to get buy-in from teachers
there are also a lot of politics involved with regard to appropriate programming languages for teaching
the Raspberry Pi is great, but it is low-powered and limited, so Aaron built Sonic Pi
he also put together a school curriculum for the UK which has just been adopted
this has caused a problem for IT educators, because they are skilled in teaching office skills
office skills are useful, but it is not understanding programming and how computers work
students and teachers liked the first iterations of the product, but the music that was generated consisted of beeps that did not resemble true music that would be used in a performance
so Aaron got some funding from the UK arts council and got professional musicians involved
along the way, the source code was forked to pursue several different possible directions
the musicians, who had never coded before, came up with some interesting approaches as to how the Sonic Pi could be used
so this led to the idea of using Sonic Pi for not just teaching computer science, but for teaching music

the remaining time of this session consisted of a Sonic Pi demonstration which was very well put together
one of the missions of the developer should be to change the perspective of others as to what programming is all about
the remaining 15 minutes of the session consisted of a Meta-eX performance (music generated via Clojure code using the same REPL process) along with semi-choreographed robots
the robots used for the performance were a Roomba, a Sphero, a hexapod, and a drone
if you want to skip to this part of the session, skip to 28:04 in the video below, which starts with a brief introduction to the performance
video of the presentation can be found at this link.

Subscribe to Erik on Software