Sunday, February 15, 2009

What would we have been if computers were not invented?

Hundreds of developers are working in Eclipse community day and night. At the moment, sixty seven active individual committers are working in different eclipse projects, probably after their day job. Why? Still many add value to the community by sharing their thoughts through newsgroups, bugzilla and blogs. Why?

We are a breed of people who like to create things out of our imagination. We like to imagine. In Lord of the Rings J R R Tolkien created hobbits, elves, dwarves and orcs from his imagination. In Harry Potter J K Rowling had created a set of magicians and witches from her imagination. Steven Spielberg creates a new world in each of his movie. The same way we like to create artefacts which shapes thoughts and visuals.

If computers were not invented we all would have been either writers, film directors, music composers, teachers, professors, stage artists, painters ..... the list goes on to the pure imagination of individuals.

Hence we often see the topic that compares computer programmers with artists! We go back to our roots when we compare ourselves to artists! The value of software engineers are increased when their artistic imagination is sharpened with the engineering skills.

The aesthetic beauty of views, editors, perspectives, wizards, menus, dialogs and much more of eclipse are mesmerizing for many eclipse developers. When we see our underlying task getting executed by the progress of a progress bar our mind will be filled with content feeling.

In a way we all are writers. We write tons and tons of lines of code. We draw beautiful figures in the form of class diagrams, sequence diagrams etc which sharpens our skill to create. We paint the class diagrams by realising them into wonderfully architectured frameworks, graphical user interfaces etc. If red, green and blue are the basic colours for a painter, 0's and 1's are our basic building blocks. From bits we create virtual worlds on which the real world depends more and more.

We are true artists of our genre!

madhu

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for sharing such nice sentiments.

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  2. One thing is for sure, if there were no computers in this world, the paper and pen business would be much bigger!

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