Sunday, May 01, 2011

Why programmers should study the art of programming

Why programmers should study the art of programming: "To the average programmer in the trenches, debating the theory of computation is like discussing the chemical properties of saltpeter while in a gunfight: it may all be correct, but it doesn’t apply directly to the problem in front of them. Why waste time imagining the outcome of a deathmatch between Haskell Curry and Alan Kay when we’ve got a deadline to slap a new web UI over our legacy application? Why should we care whether we’re using a monad or an exception to return an error state? What the heck does “orthogonal” mean? Don’t give me a research paper, just give me code that works. And so runs the “get it done yesterday” logic"