Strunk and White’s Elements of Style is one of the most popular and influential writing guides available. By replacing a few key words, it can be used as a text on programming style and the craft of software.
2.12. Choose a suitable design and hold to it.
A basic structural design underlies every kind of writing programming. Writers Programmers will in part follow this design, in part deviate from it, according to their skills, their needs, and the unexpected events that accompany the act of composition. Writing Programming, to be effective, must follow closely the thoughts of the writer programmer, but not necessarily in the order in which those thoughts occur. This calls for a scheme of procedure… in most cases, planning must be a deliberate preclude to writing programming. The first principle of composition software development, therefore, is to foresee or determine the shape of what is to come and pursue that shape.
via Kottke
After his presumption that both eBay and Wikipedia would never go mainstream was proven wrong, Joel Spolsky realised what he calls “a fundamental lesson about the nature of technological innovation”. For Inc. Magazine Joel describes his idea that the most important innovations are often those that appear to be fatally flawed.
[…] “seeming impossible” is practically a requirement for a truly great innovation. If something seems possible, that’s probably because someone is already doing it. When something seems that it can’t possibly work, nobody tries it. Real innovation happens when someone tries anyway, overlooking an obvious flaw, and finds a way to make an idea work. […] On the other hand, they simply may be impossible. But on those rare occasions when you realize that something nobody thinks can work really can work–well, on that day, you just might change the world.
Suw Charman-Anderson, founder and first Executive Director of the wonderful UK-based digital rights organisation, Open Rights Group, has produced an informative ‘mind map’ of the UK digital rights ‘landscape’.
As this was created over three years ago, an up-to-date and completed version would be of great interest.
Something I’ve never thought of reading before: the history of the QWERTY keyboard:
With the assistance of […] Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soule, [Christopher Sholes] built an early writing machine for which a patent application was filed in October 1867. However, Sholes’ “Type Writer” had many defects, [including] the tendency of the typebars to clash and jam if struck in rapid succession.
Sholes struggled for the next six years to perfect his invention, making many trial-and-error rearrangements of the original machine’s alphabetical key arrangement in an effort to reduce the frequency of typebar clashes. Eventually he arrived at a four-row, upper case keyboard approaching the modern QWERTY standard.
As Donald Norman says in The Psychology/Design of Everyday Things, “We are commited to it, even though it was designed to satisfy constraints that no longer apply, was based on a style of typing no longer used, and is difficult to learn.”
It made me think: what other ‘everyday things’ are committed to past constraints, and in my work do I design to any?