Arie Peterson wrote:
More relevantly: again Dijkstra, but now on (programming as) composing music:
"There are many different styles of composition. I characterize them always as Mozart versus Beethoven. When Mozart began to write at that time he had the composition ready in his mind. He wrote the manuscript and it was 'aus einem Guss' (casted as one). And it was also written very beautiful. Beethoven was an indecisive and a tinkerer and wrote down before he had the composition ready and plastered parts over to change them. There was a certain place where he plastered over nine times and one did remove that carefully to see what happened and it turned out the last version was the same as the first one."
This seems to me the essential problem: that most programming books assume the reader is divinely inspired like Mozart but the fact is that most of us must struggle hard like Beethoven. Programming is a *messy* activity, therefore what's needed is a book to tell us how to turn lead into gold not just how to convert gold into syntax... Regards, Brian. -- http://www.metamilk.com