Monday, May 26, 2008

Programming is destroying my capacity for reflective thought

This article in the Guardian on Thursday really struck a chord, especially after spending a day and a half!!! on a newsletter template that simply refused to allow me to insert an image.

The worst of it is that even this kind of programming has a corrupting fascination, like a videogame you can't give up: there is always the hope that one more round of changes will take you through to the next level. This pleasure seems to me not merely uncreative but anticreative. Solving these small dull problems of syntax and memorisation is essentially a very large multiple-choice exam.

There may be a creative element in deciding what colours should go to make up a website, but there is none whatsoever in trying to discover whether the command to make this happen uses curly brackets inside quotation marks, outside them, or not at all.
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