Impetus

Who the hell cares about programming? People turn away from it, laugh at it. They fear it. But that's why I'm interested. "I am a designer" is often just an excuse for not being willing to figure out how things work on a basic level. NO ONE in our society has any idea how their computers are working all the way through.

With all of my time spent looking at a Digital Humanity I never took coding seriously, never thought that I could. I was scared away from it by a hostile intro to compsci prof, by the stigma surrounding it. I spent 2 years studying that fear, looking at what computers were doing to me.

So now I want to get my hands dirty, to see what I can do to it. Logic logic logic. It's beautifully different from how I am used to thinking. It seems like every programmer I've met has let go of a certain degree of flexibility (spiritual?). I hope I don't lose touch. But I don't think I have to. Programming is the newest artform, and so far only a certain kind of person has been willing to engage with it. As the forward in "Foundation ActionScript 3.0" explains:

"Today, we look upon programming as a purely technical pursuit. We talk of a divide between the creative and the technical, and lump programmers in the latter. The programmer is today as the filmmaker was early last century: an artist toiling in relative obscurity, awaiting a code-literate society to appreciate the nuances of her art. Will it take a century to happen? I don't think so."

It's really not that hard.