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September 26, 2003
Elegance and Processing
Like Paul Ford, I've been really interested in Processing, the Java-subset language intended as a programming tool for artists. I admit I haven't been inspired to think nearly as deeply about the nature of elegance on the web as Paul does in his essay, but his essay is thought-provoking.
Ford's musings on the need for an "elegant web" remind me of something Jones wrote a while ago: wondering whether there's a way to take advantage of really effective mental models (like "Rip. Mix Burn.") to encourage more people to experiment and tinker with writing and publising and communicating. On the tinkering theme, Dan's written about Adaptive Design many times.
Paul writes:
What is sprezzatura [the art of making it look easy] for the web? Hell if I know. My way of figuring it all out is to build the system and write inside it, because I'm too dense to work out theories. I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing...."
That's the tinkerer's attitude for sure. You can feel it all over the place at AllConsuming, which is (perhaps not coincidentally) made up in large part of that RSS stuff that Ford's excited about. But I'm not sure that even a sufficiently elegant tiny language can solve Paul's central question: "why is there no consistent system for web publishing that is widely accepted?" By "consistent system", Ford means something like mental model plus reasonably standard way of specifiying behavior and organization.
I wish that people would take a step back and look at everything we've done and "elegantize" the Web as a construct, define a set of core goals that web developers want to solve and create as small as possible a language, based on the smallest possible set of principles, that will help them meet those goals.
Maybe this is best approached at the component level, or in layers, rather than as a start-from-scratch effort. See Tom Coates' thoughts on Dan's Adaptive Design presentation for exactly this idea of stringing together a few good mental models (Blogger, email, Yahoogroups) that happen to also be products.
As an aside, I hope Paul's seen Design By Numbers, which I think is a more elegant project than Processing. (Although a genuinely elegant project would be released on time; I'm still waiting for that August 2003 version of DBN 4....) DBN is intended as a teaching language, which Processing isn't exactly. DBN, to me, meets David Gelernter's definition of elegance in machines ("simplicity + power = elegance") better. It's certainly more simplified, and its power is actually impressive, given its modest ambition. Plus I think many students have a hard enough time with DBN, much less Java syntax.
Posted by Andrew at September 26, 2003 04:33 PM