Artistic Programming

The fifth issue of Artistic Programming newsletter is back after a long gap. If we were missed badly, here's your latest dose.

A Quick Word

Paul Morphy is regarded as one of the greatest chess geniuses of all times. In an era where there was no "theory" of chess, Paul Morphy had a series of wins against all the famous players of his time. His style was to come up with the most shocking tactics at times which would take the opponent by surprise and would end the game in a few moves. He was hailed as the "World Champion" of chess when no world championship existed.

One of Morphy’s greatest ambitions was to beat a player by the name, Howard Staunton, who was considered an unofficial chess champion of his times and defeating him was Morphy's ultimate aim as a chess player.

Understandably, Staunton, who had a reputation of being a typically pompous, stuffy, arrogant Victorian couldn't afford to take such a challenge. He managed to evade a match between him an Morphy for three months by pleading that "his brain was overtaxed with more important pursuits". This was a deliberate statement to imply that chess was more of a childish pursuit and there were many other matters more important than chess. Throughout this period, Staunton also kept criticizing Morphy, who was 27 years his junior, in various articles and magazines, deprecating his play, hinting that he played just for money, etc.

This had a devastating effect on young Morphy, whose life revolved against chess. He almost gave up chess entirely because of this and died shortly after that.

Isn't it surprising that Morphy, who was best at chess tactics, couldn't understand little chess-like tactics of Staunton’s off the board game and became its victim?

We all may be masters of a certain skill, but may be horrible at the application of that skill to a particular area.

We may be very good at thinking, we may be very good at a technology and a programming language, but unless we are very specifically training in "applying thinking effective to a technology or the programming language", we might find ourselves more on the "Sorrow" end rather than the "Pride" end of programming.

Artistic Programming is that catalyst that trains you effectively in applying all the ingredients that are required for programming. When you start applying what Artistic Programming trains you in, you start to realize that creating a design, writing code, debugging problems, finding fixes—all these are much simpler and easier than they normally appear to us.

If Morphy could "see" the simple ploy behind Staunton's acts, he could have saved himself so much of pain and anguish, and his life as well.

If you can "see" some of the simple facts that can make programming much simpler, you can save yourself so much pain, stress and struggle that has become synonymous with IT.

Next time you spend five hours to fix a bug—ask yourself—"can somebody teach me how I could have done that in 15 minutes?”

DID YOU KNOW?

"What is GoogleWhack?"
We all know what Google is, but why would you want to whack it around? Let's face it, even techie folk need a break every now and then and GoogleWhacking is a fun way to take a few minutes out of your wired day to play. The goal of a Googlewhack is to perform search queries that will produce only one single search result in the Google search engine. Imagine &$151; if it catches on in a big way we just might end up with a whole new Internet sporting event!.

F-O-O-D For Thot!

You need Artistic Programming if you have ever said this in your programming life: "It was working yesterday but somehow it is not working today."

A Quick Word

DID YOU KNOW?

"I am the greatest, and I said it long before I knew it."

Muhammad Ali

F-O-O-D For Thot!