Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)
I dunno, to me the whole &#x27;abc coders are xyz&#x27; is a heuristic. I value curiosity and I find that devs that are solid at a wide variety of paradigms often get there through curiosity. So if someone tells me they are learning Clojure&#x2F;Haskell&#x2F;Scheme&#x2F;Racket&#x2F;OCaml&#x2F;Br<i></i>nfuck&#x2F;Scala&#x2F;Smalltalk&#x2F;etc I&#x27;ll think that&#x27;s interesting and wonder what made them decide to learn the language. Without further information it&#x27;s a safe guess that they are curious and enjoy learning new things&#x2F;challenging themselves, things that I think are cool to do. And people who do cool things are often times cool people.<p>But Daiyi&#x27;s main point isn&#x27;t that abc coders aren&#x27;t xyz, but rather that <i>other people</i> are also xyz, and that if an efg coder becomes an abc coder and are found to be xyz then they were probably xyz back when they were efg before becoming abc coders.<p>And this point should be well taken. There is a common trend that analytic subjects contribute more value than artistic subjects. This, in part, is due to the phenomenon that analytic subjects have values that are easier to calculate (...analytically, whence this is somewhat circular) while artistic subjects have effects that must be evaluated more subjectively. A coder works for a week and adds a new feature which increases marketability. A painter works for a week and produces a painting that may eventually sell for $500 in a couple years. But this undervalues the painter---the effect of arts on a society is more than their retail value.<p>I think this in part describes why web devs&#x2F;front end engineers are socially valued less than coders in the development community. Their contributions are harder to quantify and the problems that they solve are more diffuse and subjective. This leads to &quot;it&#x27;s hard to quantify an efg coder&#x27;s contribution&quot; being conflated with &quot;efg coders contribute less&quot;.<p>But this is BS---I have yet to come across anything that isn&#x27;t both an art and a science if done correctly. In fact, this thought lead me to my own answer to one of the great philosophical questions of the ages: &quot;what is art?&quot;: I contend that art is anything done well.<p>And as a computer scientist with a prior life as a musician I can assure you that there is plenty of &#x27;calculation&#x27; that goes into the arts. Sometimes this is explicit. For instance, say that I have a closed voicing CFA (closed voicing means everything is close together) and they are moving to B?G that will then move to CEG. What do I want to replace `?` with? Well we don&#x27;t want F to move down (we try to avoid parallel motion, this can be thought of as a sort of axiom) so F must either remain fixed (oblique motion) or go up (contrary motion). We also don&#x27;t want voices to cross (while voice crossing is less taboo than parallel motion it is still often avoided, and our adherence to this restriction makes our problem much easier). Since we are working with a closed voice we have two (diatonic) choices: we can double the G or stay fixed on F. Doubling the G is boring but staying on F creates dissonance (B to F is a b5 and F to G is a M2). Luckily this dissonance is nicely resolved by the subsequent voicing and we win music! Yay!<p>Notice something? This is just a constraint system! But rather than solving a SAT formula we are adding in some subjective data to consider as well. I like to phrase this as &quot;In math, `1 + 2 + 3 = 6` while in music, `C + E + G = happy`&quot;.<p>These calculations can also be done implicitly: say I&#x27;m taking a break over some jazz tune and I&#x27;m hitting a turn around, a ii-V7-i. I have a vague notion that I want to hit the &quot;Billie Holiday special&quot; (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;KUCyjDOlnPU?t=2m59s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;KUCyjDOlnPU?t=2m59s</a>) at the end of my break (a melodic 5-2-1 with a slight scoop up to the 2 which falls back to the 1). I&#x27;m in the key of Bb and I want to play this around the tonic at the 8th fret of my D string. Right now I&#x27;m in the upper area of the neck and about to change to the ii chord which holds for two beats. I want to leave a pause over the V chord to make the tag more interesting, so I have exactly two beats to get from where I am to where I want to go, and I have to quickly &#x27;calculate&#x27; this transition in real time. This is, of course, very natural since I&#x27;ve been playing for most of my life, and the &#x27;calculation&#x27; is more of a feeling than an explicit mental exercise. But underneath the hood there is a shitload of precomputation that I did, practicing similar harmonic and melodic situations, honing my instincts, expanding my ear, studying theory, etc. I have just, in real time, solved a complicated constraint problem in front of a room full of people. And they are all cheering for me! See? People love math!<p>I&#x27;m sure I don&#x27;t have to argue the reverse direction on this site (namely that coding&#x2F;engineering&#x2F;mathematics&#x2F;etc are all forms of art) so I&#x27;ll omit this.<p>All this is to say that the distinction between the artists and scientists is very blurry. I won&#x27;t go so far as to argue that it doesn&#x27;t exist since it clearly does. But when I try to figure out what that distinction is I find a number of qualitative differences but nothing quantitative.