His observation is that I made it sound like hubris, and that hubris is generally seen as bad. I would also observe that conceit is generally seen as bad.

I did not mean it that way -- In the process of getting things done, conceit and ego are necessary tools. If I did not have enough ego to believe that I could actually pull it off, if I did not have the conceit that I could pull it off, I probably wouldn't have attempted it at all, and I certainly wouldn't have pushed hard enough to come up with the smoke and mirrors solution.

I guess I was going more for irony in the statement, and failed utterly. A more accurate and clear statement would have been: "...and the belief that I could get it to work in the first place."

2:56:30 PM    comments ()  trackback []  

It's all about appearances anyway, isn't it? It's all about how we make things look. The vast majority of the time do we really care about how things are happening behind the scenes? I suppose that as programmers we do. We're always looking for new ways to do things, and new things to do. We also care if the design is "elegant," which seems to mean either that it can be made to do many things easily, or that the code behind it performs the function exquisitely well. Sometimes we even get both.

But most of the time, to the untrained eye, what the software looks like it's doing is not at all what it is actually doing.

Like that Python (almost-)IDE that I mentioned in my last post. You look at the screenshots, you play around with it, and damn, it looks like Python is now running inside of Radio.

But it's not. It's running off to the side.

Maybe I'm off-base here, but sometimes people insist on things working a particular way, when in reality they'd be just as satisfied if instead they had merely an incredible simulation of what they are after.

No, nothing in particular set me off in this direction. I guess I'm just spewing some stream-of-consciousness stuff.

2:05:00 PM    comments ()  trackback []