Programming and Writing

March 22nd, 2010Blog0 comments

So yours truly pulled down the latest iPhone SDK 3.2 beta last Friday and dug in, checking out the new iPad Simulator and associated sample code to see what there was to see.

I will always love programming. Programming taught me a lot about writing — how to be structural, how to break large ideas down into small, workable components, and how to make things elegant and “read” properly. Lately I haven’t had a chance to program much, so I’m trying to rectify that in my spare time with a little hobbyist programming on the iPad/iPhone.

I’m probably dating myself, but fuck it — my first computer was a Commodore 64. My dad brought it home one day and hooked it up to the TV — back then, computers used CRT TV sets as their monitors. I was immediately obsessed with it. We would type in programs in BASIC that were printed in magazines like BYTE, etc., and run them. They were stored on tape drives. By that I mean cassette tapes.

Eventually I started taking the programs apart to see how they worked. This was one of my favorite things to do when I was a kid, and I still do it today with everything I read and watch. I think those early years shaped my thinking process — everything I wanted to do involved deconstructing and analyzing ideas — and then reimplementing them in my own way. So programming has always been a big part of my life. I owe a lot to it.

It’s a weird thing — people tend to perceive programming and creative writing as respectively “left brain” and “right brain” activities, but to me they’re the same side of the coin. One is designed to be compiled by a computer, and the other is designed to be compiled by the human brain — which is a lot more subjective than a computer, but still requires just as much structure and thoughtfulness.

Plus there’s something thrilling about solving a computing problem and making it work. IE, being stuck on a bug for hours and finally figuring it out and making it run.

However, the high you get from solving a writing problem is exponentially greater — because it’s about something absolutely emotional.

Palm is in Deep Shit: I was talking to my dad today — he was an early Palm Pre adopter, and I wanted to know what he plans to do if Palm goes away. Here’s the rundown on Palm’s troubles from our friend Jean-Louis Gassée, formerly of Apple and Be, Inc.

My dad is a true believer in Web OS, and is hoping that Palm will somehow weather the storm. I think that it comes down to this: Somebody needs to buy Palm. I have my doubts that Google will do it since they’re doing quite well with Android; Microsoft is doing its own Windows 7 Mobile thing. So I think Nokia or RIM are the likely candidates. A Nokia move could stop their slide into irrelevance; RIM is losing mindshare to Apple and Android, so a Palm purchase could be a good way to refresh and stay in the game.

Whatever the case, Roger McNamee is being rightfully blamed for setting expectations for the Palm Pre way too high — “The Pre going to be a million times — well, not a million times — several times faster than the iPhone” he said way back before Palm got clobbered by Apple.

In technology, no one should ever use the future tense when describing their product. Well, okay — you can — but use it in a qualitative sense like Steve Jobs does. Don’t use it in a quantitative, measurable sense. Because then you give people the ability to do the math.