"Dabblers and Blowhards" - hackers are nothing like painters [2005]

What's particularly weird about this argument is that is would not affect your essay at all to concede that, say, the period called the 'Golden Age of Dutch Painting', or the Golden Age of Spanish Painting, or one of the several other periods that art historians (inconveniently for you) commonly refer to as Golden ages of painting produced better work that the somewhat fussy and stylized paintings of the Renaissance, and that you just got excited because you really like Leonardo.

But you seem unwilling to back down from any claim once you've made it in print, no matter how silly ("Cezanne couldn't draw!"), and so we get this peculiar kind of weaseling.

Western art, like Western music or mathematics, is a cumulative enterprise, but you've done the equivalent of claiming Pythagoras was the best mathematician ever, and as evidence pointing to the fact that no serious historian of mathematics has ever said in print that Pythagoras was a worse mathematician than Euler or Gauss, when it would not occur to anyone else to think in those terms.

Apart from the fact that this is just blatant argument from authority ("no art historian would disagree with me! Not even this one, who just disagreed!"), it also a disservice to your readers, who are taking it on faith that you know what you are talking about. As Aaron's correspondence demonstrates, when someone finally does corner an art historian, and bends the poor guy's mind into thinking of the history of Western painting in the same weird categories you do, he'll politely say that you're completely full of it.

Not being an expert in philosophy, or economic history, or the trade union movement, but being a longtime student of your writing style, I suspect the same thing would happen in those fields. I just happen to know art history, so when you write about that I can poke the holes myself.

You've been coasting on the fact that most of your readers are technical people who will take the analogies you strip-mine from the humanities at face value because of their respect for you as a clever guy. You can probably continue coasting on it for the remainder of your career.

But I think you'll find that a little more humility, intellectual honesty and the confidence to abandon the occasional overeager metaphor, rather than trying at all costs to defend it, would make you an even better writer than you think you are now. Maybe not a better writer than EB White, but possibly exactly as good.

Yes, Wittgenstein focused a lot on language, but so did a lot of his contemporaries -- that's a large part of what positivism was all about. And the idea that coming up with correct and precise terms and categories as a first step goes at least all the way back to Aristotle in the Western tradition and Confucius in the Eastern. But pg doesn't mention any of this, he just name-drops Wittgenstein and gives you the impression that this is some sort of modern thing to do.

On the history of philosophy, I've got to mark pg down quite a lot for outright ignoring the pre-Socratics. Do we only have fragments of their work? Yes. Does that mean we get to write them off as "speculative cosmology"? Hell, no. Plato and Aristotle don't make sense unless you consider them in the context of the philosophers who came before them, primarily the Elean and Milesian schools. And I can't understand why someone who writes so much about entrepreneurship would willingly ignore Thales (unless it's to sweep under the rug the fact that Thales -- though he could and did apply his analytic and philosophical techniques to make money -- didn't seem to care much about practical results and in fact did more than a few things to spite and shame people who wanted such results).

I'm going to gloss over pg's interpretation of Aristotle and simply recommend that people actually read Aristotle, or at least well-prepared exegesis of Aristotle; that's a topic too large to tackle in a comment.

But talking about the next 1500 years' worth of philosophy just aping Plato and Aristotle without doing any critical thinking is, well, flat-out wrong. Aristotle was indeed highly regarded by later medieval thinkers -- after about the eleventh century AD or so -- but he was far from the only game in town until that point, and most of the regard for his work and Plato's wasn't due to slavish repetition of muddled thinking: medieval philosophers simply didn't have the kind of access to classical work that we enjoy today, and so they used what material they had.

From there, pg goes off into what looks like his own flight of unthinking hero-worship, but this one's centered on Wittgenstein. Yes, Wittgenstein's important, but he was far from the first person to discover "that most previous philosophy was a waste of time". One suspects that pg has never read, or has forgotten what he read in, Hume, who delivered the real kick in the pants about two centuries earlier (and quite a bit of Hume's most interesting work had been anticipated in antiquity -- the same antiquity which, pg tells us, was far too muddled and concerned with "big generalities" to produce useful or interesting work).

(aside: I think this, more than anything, is what bothers me about pg's summary of philosophy: you don't get to condense Western philosophy into a single essay without even mentioning Hume's name. He even goes so far as to attribute to Kant honors which -- and if you've read Kant you'll see even he felt this way -- rightly belong to Hume.)

Finally, pg ends up at a "proposal" which, so far as I can tell, is identical to the classical pragmatism of William James (whose name is also conspicuously absent from the essay). He rounds this up by reiterating the falsehood that everybody else was just aping Plato and Aristotle for a couple millennia (perhaps pg simply misunderstood a famous quote from Alfred North Whitehead, and took a literal interpretation).

So, basically, pg's spent a lot of time pouring out a "sea of words" riddled with historical inaccuracies and omissions, and used it all to advocate as new a philosophy which has been well-known for over a century. This is not something of which I can approve :)

In 'real' art (painting and sculpture for instance) the execution and the expression are inseparable, in programming you can delineate the one from the other reasonably well.

For instance, a mathematician without any programming skills could sketch out the basis of an algorithm, which could then be implemented by programmers familiar with their particular language.

> Didn't an analysis of the Mona Lisa detect multiple layers of paint, indicating that the artist had retouched many parts of it?

Yes, so ? He didn't get it 'right' or 'satisfactory' the first time and decided to change it.

But there is a reason why artists sign their works and programmers can collaborate, even across vast distances on the same work.

In the end it is all bits.

If Da Vinci had reduced the idea of the La Gioconda to 4 squares and you asked four different painters to create the 4 squares and you'd merge them the painting would probably not be hanging in the Louvre right now.

Even if he had sketched it and sent it off in four pieces as a guide it still wouldn't have worked.

And that process works quite well for software, which indicates to me that the two are fundamentally different.

> For some reason, the plumbing and brickwork in programming isn't viewed the same way by all people.

No doubt.

> Perhaps it's because of the use of low level languages (and by low level, I mean anything less abstract than Ruby or Haskell). I personally find it gratifying to refactor code into something more elegant, and I'm sorry if you don't see it that way.

Refactoring code and optimizations are a step above simply putting layers of stone above each other, effectively you've temporarily switched back to architectural mode.

And I definitely agree with you that that is a gratifying thing to do. But it also indicates to me that I should be more diligent during the design phase because refactoring, no matter how satisfying is an expensive thing to do.