i wrote this paraphrase of christopher alexander a while ago and always liked it.
Fri, 4 Jan 2002 00:00:32 +0000 (GMT) > I would like to hear something specific about what constraints the rules > or tools of programming place on the "architectural" or design ideas of > a net artist. i can offer you something very, very general, mostly by way of christopher alexander (sorry to those i've pushed this at already; personal feelings a few screens down) "The power to make programs beautiful lies in each of us already. It is a core so simple, and so deep, that we are born with it. Imagine the greatest possible beauty and harmony in the world - the most beautiful program that you have ever seen or dreamt of. You have the power to create it, at this very moment, just as you are. And this power we have is so firmly rooted and coherent in every one of us that once it is liberated, it will allow us, by our individual, unconnected acts, to make a network, without the slightest need for plans, because like every living process, it is a process which builds order out of nothing. But as things are, we have so far beset ourselves with rules, and concepts, and ideas of what must be done to make a program or a network alive, that we have become afraid of what will happen naturally, and convinced that we must work within a "system", and with "methods", since without them our surroundings will come tumbling down in chaos. We are afraid, perhaps, that without images and methods, chaos will break loose; worse still, that unless we use images of some kind, ourselves, our own creation will itself be chaos. And why are we afraid of that? Is it because people will laugh at us, if we make chaos? Or is it, perhaps, that we are most afraid of all that if we do make chaos, we will ourselves be chaos, hollow, nothing? This is why it is so easy for others to play on our fears. They can persuade us that we must have more method, and more system, because we are afraid of our own chaos. Without method and more method, we are afraid the chaos which is in us will reveal itself. And yet these methods only make things worse. The thoughts and fears which feed these methods are illusions. It is the fears which these illusions have created in us, that make software which is dead and lifeless and artificial. And - greatest irony of all - it is the very methods we invent to free us from our fears which are themselves the chains whose grip on us creates our difficulties. For the fact is, that this seeming chaos which is in us is a rich, rolling, swelling, dying, lilting, singing, laughing, shouting, crying, sleeping order. If we will only let this order guide our acts of programming, the programs that we make, the networks we help to make, will be the forests and the meadows of the human mind. To purge ourselves of these illusions, to become free of all the artificial images of order which distort the nature that is in us, we must first learn a discipline which teaches us the true relationship between ourselves and our surroundings. Then, once this discipline has done its work, and pricked the bubbles of illusion which we cling to now, we will be ready to give up the discipline, and act as nature does. This is the timeless way of programming: learning the discipline - and shedding it." ( cf "The Timeless Way of Building", Christopher Alexander)