twfarland

Classic! You might have done him a service, but perhaps you've done those around him a disservice - now he bears no evidence of toolhood as obvious as a mullet!

It might just be that people are so easily offended because they're not used to being offended.

Fascinating. Makes me think of the original meaning of the word 'essay' - 'to attempt.'

I can absolutely second this. I read it once a year. Many of its techniques are readily applicable to programming or design, after a tiny bit of abstraction.

I'm going through this now. I've no math/logic background but wish to learn, so is perfect for where I'm at. Interactivity is a great learning tool. The book's focus isn't on real world software engineering though, so anyone expecting that should look elsewhere.

Agreed. The author is lucky to have a taste for the quiet life. My wife and I would bite each other's heads off if we stayed in a van eating salad and I'm sure my grandparents would have too. I'm happy to pay for a bit of light hedonism.

The dichotomy of 'design vs code' feels artificial to me.

The activities of designing and of coding overlap extensively. Both require a clarity of communication, a deep consideration of the purpose of the thing to be designed/built, and a sense of taste.

If in the habit of extracting general principles from concrete examples, coders can become better coders by learning aspects of design and vice versa.

Many of the concepts in a 'coder' book like 'How to design programs,' for example, are readily applicable to UX design, e.g: refactoring, wishful thinking, generalisation of purpose, and the control of complexity by use of 'black boxes.'

Likewise, a 'designer' book like 'The design of everyday things' is full of stuff that applies usefully to the activity of coding, e.g: the importance of meaningful feedback, and of ensuring a clear mapping between expected actions and their outcomes.

These correlations aren't everywhere to be found, though. But I've always found interdisciplinary people to have the freshest approaches.

You might also be able to partition the place. I'd prefer planes, trains, restaurants etc with child-free areas, for the same reason I prefer restaurants with smoke-free areas. You'd just need to control the noise rather than the airflow.

Great fun. Do you generate any of your javascript from clojure, or write it directly?

Hm, I'm a lisp newbie but just had a little think about this (http://blog.timfarland.com/2011/05/12/lithp.html). I'd be happy just giving special forms short, mostly non-alphabetic names, and using a bit of matchfix sugar, looking something like:

  (def map 
    (-> |list f|
        (? (== list []) []
           // (: (f (. list)) (map (.. list) f)))))

Thanks... I just think there is some old-school anthropomorphism at work here. They're putting a human face on an incomprehensible force, just as the ancients did when creating a god for a natural force that was perhaps equally incomprehensible to them.

Sometimes I think we are driven by our animal instincts, and that intelligence is just 'processing power' that modulates or assists those instincts. I wonder, would a system with unlimited processing power even 'want' to develop and expand if it didn't have any 'urges?' Or would there be a chance that it would happen upon the creation of its own arbitrary 'instincts?'

I haven't spent that much time here and never heard of opencourseware. Looks perfect. Thank you.

Thank you for the thoughtful response, it was much more helpful than wading through search results. I will do this.

I've gone in almost the opposite direction, I studied fine arts and have been steadily moving into dev over the last few years.

I find it inevitable that I study a new thing in terms of what I studied before. So I approached programming with an aesthetics/communication mindset.

If you are going the other way, you mind find it useful to approach design via quite formal subjects like proportion, symmetry, colour theory, and user behaviour. These have syntax and grammar, like any programming language.

Don't worry about photoshop or whatever. Don't focus on 'drawing graphics,' but on usability. Your programming background will serve you well in that.

What and I trying to day? Basically, you're probably already further down the path to designerhood than you might think, since you're a practical person who needs to communicate and handle complex systems.

I think it genuinely addresses some of the design flaws of css (too much repetition). That can't be bad. But I'm not sure a new syntax needs to be created for the job. I'm having a little play with using plain json to represent css in a similar style: http://github.com/twfarland/son (on node.js/express). There are still some things I need to add (firebug integration, creating actual css files) but it seems helpful so far.

Elegant!