In the meantime, here's something that caught my eye:

One of the computing pioneers whose work I've had the pleasure of digging into for my book is Alan Kay. In the course of my research I had occasion to read Kay's epic account of The Early History of Smalltalk. Smalltalk is the object-oriented programming language Kay created in the early 1970s at Xerox PARC (while he was also inventing much of the rest of modern computing). The paper is full of interesting stuff, but this observation near the end, about how to motivate yourself to tackle difficult challenges, jumped out at me:

A twentieth century problem is that technology has become too "easy". When it was hard to do anything whether good or bad, enough time was taken so that the result was usually good. Now we can make things almost trivially, especially in software, but most of the designs are trivial as well. This is inverse vandalism: the making of things because you can. Couple this to even less sophisticated buyers and you have generated an exploitation marketplace similar to that set up for teenagers. A counter to this is to generate enormous disatisfaction with one's designs using the entire history of human art as a standard and goal. Then the trick is to decouple the disatisfaction from self worth -- otherwise it is either too depressing or one stops too soon with trivial results.

"Generate enormous dissatisfaction" with one's work -- well, gee, that's something most ambitious people know how to do, one way or another. But such dissatisfaction quickly blossoms into neurotic self-doubt. Ergo Kay's careful recommendation to "decouple the dissatisfaction from self-worth": that's genius. And, I might add, really, really helpful to anyone laboring over a big project like, say, a book.

Of course, this means that you have to figure out other bases for self-worth than the work one has generated enormous dissatisfaction with!

"Forget the myths the media's created about the White House.  The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand."  ~ Deep Throat. From the 1976 film "All the President's Men."

Below the Fold:

The Full Sunday Lineup

Tom Delay's wanted poster

In the Comment Section

September 11th should never have occured

Nailing the Hammer (protest photos)

Indicting Rumsfeld for Torture

Lampooning Shrub and Delay

Talk of the Internets

Baaadaasss Women

Condi, bite your tongue!

Top 40 magazine covers of the last 40 years

Cuban Missile Crisis

In the meantime, here's something that caught my eye:

One of the computing pioneers whose work I've had the pleasure of digging into for my book is Alan Kay. In the course of my research I had occasion to read Kay's epic account of The Early History of Smalltalk. Smalltalk is the object-oriented programming language Kay created in the early 1970s at Xerox PARC (while he was also inventing much of the rest of modern computing). The paper is full of interesting stuff, but this observation near the end, about how to motivate yourself to tackle difficult challenges, jumped out at me:

A twentieth century problem is that technology has become too "easy". When it was hard to do anything whether good or bad, enough time was taken so that the result was usually good. Now we can make things almost trivially, especially in software, but most of the designs are trivial as well. This is inverse vandalism: the making of things because you can. Couple this to even less sophisticated buyers and you have generated an exploitation marketplace similar to that set up for teenagers. A counter to this is to generate enormous disatisfaction with one's designs using the entire history of human art as a standard and goal. Then the trick is to decouple the disatisfaction from self worth -- otherwise it is either too depressing or one stops too soon with trivial results.

"Generate enormous dissatisfaction" with one's work -- well, gee, that's something most ambitious people know how to do, one way or another. But such dissatisfaction quickly blossoms into neurotic self-doubt. Ergo Kay's careful recommendation to "decouple the dissatisfaction from self-worth": that's genius. And, I might add, really, really helpful to anyone laboring over a big project like, say, a book.

Of course, this means that you have to figure out other bases for self-worth than the work one has generated enormous dissatisfaction with!

"Forget the myths the media's created about the White House.  The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand."  ~ Deep Throat. From the 1976 film "All the President's Men."

Below the Fold:

The Full Sunday Lineup

Tom Delay's wanted poster

In the Comment Section

September 11th should never have occured

Nailing the Hammer (protest photos)

Indicting Rumsfeld for Torture

Lampooning Shrub and Delay

Talk of the Internets

Baaadaasss Women

Condi, bite your tongue!

Top 40 magazine covers of the last 40 years

Cuban Missile Crisis