Design, Composition, and Performance (talk)

[droqen]

Regarding Rich Hickey's
"Design, Composition, and Performance"

[droqen]

People say "I can't do design, I don't have time. I don't have time to do design." But I will make the argument that design is the key to more efficiency. Because it's a lot easier to iterate a design than it is to iterate a solution or an implementation.

[droqen]

The arts are not usually about solving real world problems at all, but if you look at any of the art forms where there's somebody like a composer (or a choreographer, etc) the first thing these people do is they make problems for themselves. They set up a set of constraints under which they're going to form an artistic work.

Holy shit lol this is nesting flawlessly with The Grasshopper and art as play etc

[droqen]

this is really beautiful; look at its perfect simplicity

[droqen]

When you get to larger scales (like when Bartok does these larger compositions) you end up with this set of constraints at each level; larger works just have more structural components, but they're very stratified. [Bartok] has all kinds of techniques for dealing with harmony in the small and form in the large.

[droqen]

Some people think that improvisation is some genius just spontaneously emoting. It is not that. That is not the way it works. The best improvisers practice the most. (John Coltrane is a great example of somebody who practiced an amazing amount of time, and studied quite extensively.)

What you end up hearing when you hear an improvisation is an application of a lot of knowledge, and a tremendous amount of vocabulary.

[droqen]

If you look at the insides of some of what Coltrane is doing it just seems like the most emotional thing, but there's a tremendous amount of intellectual stuff going on there. It's the same thing with Bartok: you can listen to some piece that will make you cry, and then you can look at the score and it's full of fibonacci ratios.

[droqen]

There are people who can make music by waving their hands through the air. They don't need emacs or anything else. They don't need a million options or deep class hierarchies or anything else.

[droqen]

On one level, design is about imagining things. [..] I have this set of problems, I have this set of constraints, and I know I can solve that. [..] and try not to get the first answer, but try to get a lot of answers, and then have them to choose from.

[droqen]

Design is about making decisions. After you've got this spectrum of things you think are interesting answers [..] you need to admit very little. You want to mostly say no. Design is about making decisions. The value of a design is in conveying those decisions to the next person. It's to help out the next person: the musician that doesn't want to solder.

[droqen]

Take things apart with an eye towards how you're going to put them back together

Design like Bartok - think about the way things fit together at every level - bring the design sensibilities to the small things into the medium size things into the large things, and often apply different techniques and different ways of thinking for each level.

Code like Coltrane - bring that harmonic design sensibility!

Seek out and build languages and libraries that are like instruments. (Instruments are simple in a deep way. Instruments are for one person. Instruments do one thing.)

Pursue harmony. It's real easy to code right at a problem and then get an answer. But if you haven't thought about how things fit together that answer is not going to be easy to maintain, change, or reuse. So you have to think about harmony as you go.