Readings Discussion 2
"What is Software Design?" by Jack W. Reeves.
"The Cognitive View" by Robert Glass.
Our class is designed to provide you with the encouragement and opportunity to translate your theories, models and ideas about social and cultural complexity into "what-f" experimental and exploratory simulations. Like all scientific, literary and artistic work this is a creative process. But like all creative processes, one must gain experience and confidence in the media in which your creativity is expressed. In science, perhaps the media are mathematics, experimentation and instrumentation. In literature the media are the spoken and written word. In the arts the media may be film, music or dance or maybe paint, bronze and marble. In all these fields the computational media are becomming more and more interwoven with daily practice. In this course we want you to gain familiarity with the process of writing code and confidence that you can express yourself creatively as "cultural programmers." We want you to acquire a sense of entitlement to these new technologies of thought.
In these essays, the authors discuss the creative process of writing code as "software design." Like all creative and inventive processes it is difficult to describe exactly what is going on in words, and so the authors take quite a few pages to put their experiences and thoughts in words. Their style is informal and their essays are a quick and easy read, but the implications of what they are trying to say are much longer lasting...
Please take some time to consider what they have to say about "software design." How would their experiences and advice to the process of "software design" (or theory development) for social and cultural sciences expressed as computer simulations.
Specifically, reflect on your experiences to date in this course in writing code. How do you approach writing code? In other words, what steps do you find yourself taking in translating your ideas into functioning C++ functions and routines? How would you go about improving your technique?
Please turn in your discussion on paper, 2-3 pages, single spaced.