Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
seat-of-the-pants approach.”
57
The general consensus was that computer
programming was “the kind of work that is called creative [and] creative
work just cannot be managed.”
58
The word creative and its various analogs have frequently been used
to describe the work of computer specialists—and computer program-
mers in particular—most often in the context of discussions about their
alleged unmanageability. But what did it mean to do creative work in
the corporate context? Surely computer programming is not the only
white-collar occupation that requires skill, ingenuity, and imagination?
And why did the supposed creativity of programmers suddenly, in a
relatively short period in the late 1960s, become a major professional
liability rather than the asset it had been just a few years earlier?
The earliest and most obvious references to programmer creativity
appear in discussions of the black art of programming in the 1950s. For
the most part these references are disparaging, referring to the arcane and
idiosyncratic techniques as well as mysterious—and quite possibly chime-
rical—genius of individual programmers. John Backus, for example, had
no use for such expressions of programmer creativity.
59
Yet for many
others the idea of the programmer as artist was compelling and captured
useful truths. When Frederick Brooks described the programmer as a
poet, building “castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the
imagination,” he meant the metaphor to be taken seriously.
60
The noted
computer scientist Donald Knuth also frequently portrayed programming
as a legitimate literary genre, and went so far as to suggest that it “is best
regarded as the process of creating literature, which are meant to be
read.”
61
Although references to programming as an creative activity in
this artistic sense pervade the technical and popular literature on comput-
ing, and play an important role in defi ning the programming community's
self-identity from the 1950s to the present, this is not the sense in which
programming was considered creative by most corporate managers.
62
The meaning of creativity most often mobilized in the corporate
context was intended to differentiate the mechanical tasks associated
with programming—the coding of machine instructions, for example—
from the more intellectual activities associated with design and analysis.
As was described in chapter 2, early attempts to defi ne programming in
terms of coding did not long survive their infancy. Translating even the
simplest and most well-defi ned algorithm into the limited set of instruc-
tions understood by a computer turned out to require a great deal of
human ingenuity. This is one expression of programmer creativity. But
more important, the process of constructing the algorithm in the fi rst
