Crockford on JavaScript - Section 8: Programming Style & Your Brain

…it can be as good or better than a presentation without the material that is read aloud. But at the same time you are wasting the potential of a presentation that is solely meant to help the attendee/listener along and to drive home the important points or even to just use it as a rhetoric device . As an extreme example, look at this presentation: link to this video 1. Most of the time his slides do not even contain a summary of what he talks about but just the headline or the punchline. And I find his style very refreshing. If you really want to have stuff that you want your listeners to be able to work through at home, something which contains all important aspects, then just publish lecture notes…

Douglas Crockford has a great talk that touches on the head-gut connection and how it relates to programming. "We could not program without our gut. I have absolutely no evidence to justify that statement. But my gut tells me it's true, so I believe it." link to this video

Douglas Crockford touches on this aspect in this entertaining and insightful talk 0. I'm guilty of what you state and I think a large part of "programming" is rudimentary boiler plate coding/configuration and staring into the Abyss. I think our role will be to design algorithms and come up with creative solutions/hacks (which would be difficult for a program) and designing a workflow/flow chart and feeding it into a program which spits out binaries and flag for edge cases. A whole swat industries and economies (read outsourcing) will become redundant and only outsourcing done would be to the generator. 0: link to this video

Slightly off topic but I found this video on Programming Style & Your Brain, also from YUI conf, very enjoyable.

…hink most programmers are weird in that respect. As Douglas Crockford says: I think there has to be something seriously wrong with you in order to do this work. A normal person, once they’ve looked into the abyss, will say, “I’m done. This is stupid. I’m going to do something else.” But not us, ‘cause there’s something really wrong with us. 1 1. link to this video…

…r heads. There's a certain je ne sais quois about many who write code. It's not just programmers who notice it. A few months ago, I overheard two finance people talking about me. One said, "Geoff's kind of a weird guy, don't you think?" To which the other replied, "You haven't met many programmers, have you?" Douglas Crockford seems to agree. From link to this video : I think there has to be something seriously wrong with you in order to do this work. A normal person, once they’ve looked into the abyss, will say, “I’m done. This is stupid. I’m going to do something else.” But not us, ‘cause there’s something really wrong with us.…

> But when does this grief stop? It doesn't, but we get used to it. I take the same view as Douglas Crockford: I think there has to be something seriously wrong with you in order to do this work. A normal person, once they’ve looked into the abyss, will say, “I’m done. This is stupid. I’m going to do something else.” But not us, ‘cause there’s something really wrong with us. 1 I'm pretty sure this "brokenness" can be trained, but tossing someone in the deep end is not the way to do it. 1. From Programming Style & Your Brain: link to this video