Tech Tantra Thursday - Bill Eberle

Challenge Question
- Is it useful to see a relationship between the programmer's decisions about creating unique copies (slightly different code) vs calls to a separate method (exactly the same code) and the mathematical fields of orthogonal matrices and groups?

Peter Olotka: OK - But what are " mathematical fields of orthogonal matrices"?

Bill Eberle: The article has some links to wiki articles; its something I will need to explore to understand better. Currently, it's just a nagging rumble that keeps reoccurring, connected to that word or family of words. The transposition of "square" sets is a simple entry poiint, e.g. 0 1 and 1 0, 0 0 1 and 1 1 0 . . . How it connects to what I'm experiencing when I'm coding and reusing code over and over again with subtle differences is something I don't yet know.

Peter Olotka: Mystical Mystery Tour

Jefferson Krogh: I don't write Perl at a very high level, but I have had similar thoughts. I maintain a series of scripts design to translate a variety of formats into a different standard format. While said standard format is loose at best, and used by us in a variety of ways, I can't help but think that I should be able to create One Parsing Function To Rule Them All, rather than customize it over and over again.

Bill Eberle: Ah, yes . . . you understand the spirit of what I'm interested in. I look forward to hearing your ideas about my article and what I learn.

Bill Eberle: Peter, I'm remembering Sid's ideas for creative thinking . . . one of his ideas was to try to find connections between different kinds of things.

Jefferson Krogh: As an English major who vocationally reincarnated into an I.T. jack of all trades, I'm glad to see that these questions haunt experienced programmers as well. Another layer to my experience is that I know I'm recreating work that others have done. I'm creating interfaces between our customers' data and our systems simply because they're not willing to do it on their own. In the end, I feel like I'm trying to get all these *people* aligned, not just the software. If the people agreed on the standard for these transactions, I wouldn't have to write any code at all.

Bill Eberle: Ho. I was an English major too.

Bill Eberle: And self-taught in all the areas of software and database engineering I've worked in.

Jefferson Krogh: Seems that most IT pros I've met were self-taught. Sometimes I wish I could specialize in a technology, but it's interesting to get to work with a variety of things (in my case, Microsoft, Citrix, VMWare, Cisco, Perl, etc. etc.). I wonder if the network part of my job changes the way I think about writing Perl scripts?

Bill Eberle: I'm sure it does because, always, for me at least, the most compelliing, most powerful force which animates code is the problem I've discovered or invented as a goal and my relationship to that problem as I figure it out, sometimes by insight and sometimes by trial and error and always by testing my assumptions (programmers don't take much for granted because they've learned and re-learned that some facts about a problem are not readily apparent and need to be discovered . . . by testing [added:, and by playing, which is absolutely our best way for beginning to understand and appreciate anything]). And what I remember is my determination during the process and my satisfaction when I finally find a solution and bring something new into the world of possibilities. Each piece of the puzzle has its universe, Cosmic Encounter® or the networks connecting computers and other devices or the devices or the humans that use them or the programs humans create to make things happen; and each universe has its facts, its problems, and its possibilities (new goals which begin life as problems and sometimes end up as solutions). We all fit together, one way or another.

Bill Eberle: Jefferson, re: "One Parsing Function To Rule Them All" makes me think of lex and yacc. O'Reilly has a book devoted to those two Unix programs, and I'm sure there are others.

Bill Eberle: An update and some new ideas about what I should be exploring in this weeks Tech Tantra article. Also, added better navigation between articles.