Beauty in code vs. High-level autism
FreeTechBooks.com is a magical wonderland of free textbooks on techie stuff.
I’m kind of surprised at the titles of the programming books:”How To Think Like A Computer Scientist Using Python,” etc. Who the hell wants to think like that with Python? The smartest CS guy I knew was a guy at Cal named Ka-Ping Yee–a total holy-fire-having, skull-meltingly-smart, superhumanly nice guy–who taught a Python class called “Beautiful Code.” Now that is the way to think about programming. The mechanics of it are important, as The Daily WTF too often proves, but if it were really just a matter of tossing numbers around, we would have taught machines how to do it by now.
The engineering is important, but without the vision it’s just spec. At the heart of each building the architect puts a poem, and technology is just art that moves.