The Art of Lisp & Writing
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.
Charles Darwin
Lisp is the language of loveliness. With it a great programmer can make a beautiful, operating thing, a thing organically created and formed through the interaction of a programmer/artist and a medium of expression that happens to execute on a computer.
Taught that programmingor the worse "developing software"is like a routine engineering activity, many find difficulty seeing writing as a model or even a metaphor for programming. Writing is creative, it is self-expression, it is art, which is to say it isn't a science and unlike science and engineering, it isn't a serious activity. Judgments like this, though, are easiest made by people who don't seriously engage in making both science and art. Art, engineering, and science arein that orderpart of a continuum of finding truth in the world and about ourselves.
Artists make things and have always done so, gathering knowledge. There is sometimes no other purpose for what artists make than the need to embody an artistic statement in some formperhaps in an artifact or perhaps on paper. When an artist makes something, he or she is drawing on two parts (at least) of the world at the same time: the part that is driving the construction which could be thought of as being within the artist in a sense, and the part that is in the world providing the substances that combine under physical laws to become the artistic artifact. The least bit of artistic knowledge-making is that the artist is, in making the thing, making a map of what is possible and how the physical world relates to the metaphorical, imaginative, and interior worlds of people. And the other extreme is that in trying to make something perhaps grand, the artist is stretching what people know about the world. Even today there is debate about how some artistic structures were made by ancient artists. Artists discover the properties of the world.
Artists who create by writing or producing other representations of what the world is or could be are also laying out a map for how the world could become, and in cases where artists need technological explanations in their stories and myths, scientists and engineers in many cases explore how to build what they were delighted to learn about as children or adults from the dream-makers. For example, in 1587 someone published a set of tall tales about a possibly historical man known as "Faustus" in a book that came to be known as German Faustbuch or Historia von D. Johan Faustus. The Faustbuch was translated and changed by a man known only as "P. F." in 1592 into the English as The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus. In this book Dr. John Faustus rides a wagon pulled by dragons to the sun. And as time went on, engineers and scientists worked on and devised flying machines, as commonplace today as were sailing ships in the 16th century. Is it a coincidence that cellphones look suspiciously like Star Trek communicators? We can see an early fascination with traveling beneath the sea in the story of Jonah and in the legend of Atlantis. Greeks and Romans wrote about diving bells, and so did medieval writers.
As people need or want to do things with materials and the world, people with special skill take the fore and devise or discover how to manipulate the physical world to make those things. To avoid future mistakes, these makers write down rules of thumb, patterns of creation and making, and safety factors as a practical matter. Today we call them engineers. When we think of engineering today we think of carefully planned scientific engineering such as building bridges, where it is a fairly linear though costly and complicated process to go from the planning stage to a completed bridge. We forget the centuries of tinkering with bridge design in prehistoric and ancient times when bridges were gingerly tested as designers searched for principles. Even still, on November 7, 1940, at 11:00AM, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsed from wind-caused vibrations after being open to the public for a few months, showing that even sophisticated engineering techniquesone could even call them contemporary engineering techniquescan fail.†
Nevertheless, engineering knowledge has usually preceded scientific knowledge and often has remained constant while scientific theories about the engineering materials came and went. "Engineers" were able to create sophisticated fires for cooking and metal working using chimneys and other forms of forced oxygen for centuries while scientists flailed from theory to theory. For example, while advanced fire-based engineering was going on in the 6th century BC in Greece, Anaximenes's theory was that the source or nature of the cosmos was aer (air). Aer was constantly in motion. When aer expanded it became aither (ether: bright fiery air as on a clear day); when it expanded further, it became fire. As aer condensed it became clouds; further condensation led to water, ice, earth, and finally rock. Throughout history there have been various theories of what fire was; nevertheless, the chimneys and other artifacts of working with fire remained constant and working properly.
Scientists come along at the end; they take what artists and engineers have found out or dreamed about the world and try to weave a simplified narrative that explains it all. Scientists need to find the small set of facts, conditions, laws, forces, and principles that cause the beautiful complexity we experience. Since Galileo they have agreed to use mathematics as the language of scientific knowledge.
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