I want to connect the reading to my experience in programming this week. In the introduction, Chun makes mention of the history, now no longer true, of software being uncopyrightable because it was not considered a creative expression. I don’t think I’m saying anything controversial, especially with this crowd (my fellow Media Theory travelers) when I say that it very much is a creative expression. There is an elegance in good code that isn’t radically different from the elegance of a good song, or poem. (I presume the latter because I, like Scott, am not that familiar with poetry.)

I am an inelegant writer of code. This isn’t to beat myself up about it but to acknowledge something interesting about approaches to coding. I am a brute-force-ist. When I made the 500 bubbles sketch, I had an if loop that would randomly place bubbles until a ticking variable reached 500. There was a much more elegant way to do that, with an array, but my mind simply didn’t work that way. I write twenty lines of code where somebody else would write two.

Of course, part of this is my being a novice, but I’ve seen more elegant code out of my fellow neophyte classmates and it points to a type of cognition rather than just a level of experience. I’m reminded of a game I’ve played recently, The Witness, which consists of numerous line puzzles. Sometimes I get frustrated, not able to find the solution, and I just start systematically attempting each possible solution with no thought as to if it works or not, but just as a way to—again—brute force the solution. My mind goes to “it doesn’t matter if it’s done well, but if it is done.” I think this is part of my mental roadblock with last week’s coding lesson. We are getting into territory where brute-forcing a thing isn’t going to cut it. I don’t think I’m a lost case but I’m interested to see how much work it takes for it to click and if it will be a paradigm shift for my approach to coding.