Fwd: An Open Letter

[mca]

Thought I'd share this email from Mel Conway (remember Conway' Law?) regarding his current work.

I find the general idea very compelling and would love to see others weigh in on this either on twitter (using his hashtag) or even here on the list.

cheers.

mca

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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Mel Conway <conwa...@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Sep 18, 2015 at 12:19 PM
Subject: An Open Letter
To:

To my friends, colleagues, and family:

I’ve just tweeted a link to a new paper:

“An Open Letter to the Tech Community: Humanize the Craft of Building Interactive Computer Applications”. 

I invite you to follow me on Twitter at @conways_law or http://twitter.com/conways_law . 

You can also find the paper at 

http://melconway.com/humanize-the-craft.pdf

This five-page paper describes, in almost completely nontechnical terms, what I have learned during a half-century career of thinking mostly about one problem: simplifying the software-building process. It invites the tech community to think differently about applications so that application building can be taught in elementary schools. The paper proposes specific design principles for the new craft. 

You will read in the first paragraph:

“Over the span of human history the understanding of three important technologies has migrated from the domains of priests to the domains of elementary school teachers: arithmetic, writing, and the calendar. Now software technology must join this migration.”

Then:

“My search for a new approach has led me to thinking about building applications, not from what is particular to software, but from what is universal to humanity.” 

Let’s have a conversation at #HumanizeTheCraft . 

My best,

Mel

--

Check out Conway's Law

Resume: http://melconway.com/resume.pdf

New mobile number: 978-712-4925

[Eric Johnson]

Conway presents an interesting frame for thinking about the act of application building.

However, I think I view the application building aim through a more complex lens. In building a great application, one is building a dialog with the end user. That dialog will consist of a complex interaction of pictures, motion, text, sound, and timing. Some parts of applications are more appropriately oriented around text, and some more around pictures. This leads me to conclude that the best applications must be (a) written by teams, (b) written by people familiar with thinking about which kinds of communication are appropriate, and when. These cannot then be six-year-olds, or even sixth graders, but possibly require people with college level skills, or beyond.

So why not target the opposite extreme - what can make those experts able to move more quickly? How can they improve their code in front of the customer, on the fly? How can we make them more efficient? (Perhaps very useful questions for the golang-nuts mailing list). Then, once we start hitting upon best practices there, then we can start pushing those skills back to elementary school!

Just like how we teach elementary school children how to write, not because we expect them to be great writers, but because we believe that teaching individual skills is the right approach to teaching overall writing well. Same pattern already applies for programming. Let's teach formal logic, let's teach writing down task instructions, let's teach abstract thinking. Even in a world where we can completely redesign how we build applications, we'll still need those things.

Eric.

[Jeremy R]

It reminds me rather strongly of this keynote a little while ago... http://www.infoq.com/presentations/programming-distributed-cognition

[MattM]

Great link!  Thanks for sharing!
m@

[J Fernandes]

+1 Thanks for sharing!

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[Ahmad Nassri]

excellent! thanks for sharing!

this is especially interesting as I launched The Open Development Method: https://opendevelopmentmethod.org & Hacker Bio: https://hacker.bio/ both an attempt at #HumanizeTheCraft in different aspects!

I shall certainly reach out to Mel and get some further feedback!