[Rio-pm] Software como Arte

[breno]

Muito legal, Henrique!

Eu confesso q fiquei um pouco perdido com as datas: da vinci já tinha
48 anos de idade em 1500 e acho que nunca pisou nos EUA; e o artigo de
1969 referencia um documento de 1989, mas depois vi que o artigo
refere-se à história da engenharia de software e é de 1996. Mas mesmo
que seja uma ficção, atesta questões bastante interessantes e a
associação com arte, bons programadores, linhas de produção e
criatividade.

Num dos últimos encontros da Rio PM vimos uma exposição no flamengo de
arte+programação, acho que o cartão ficou com o Fernando... sem dúvida
também uma ótima fonte!

[]s

-b



On Nov 26, 2007 6:29 PM, Henrique Rabelo de Andrade
<henrique.andrade em uniriotec.br> wrote:
> Amigos, lendo esse texto que foi publicado em uma conferência da OTAN
> sobre engenharia de software lembrei de uma conversa recorrente dos
> encontros sociais, que é "programação como arte".
>
> []s
> Henrique Andrade.
>
>
> ----
>
> http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/brian.randell/NATO/NATOReports/index.html#Appendix
>
>
> Masterpiece Engineering
>
> T. H. Simpson
> IBM Corporation,
> Wheaton, Maryland
>
> You may be interested in an experience I had last night while I was
> trying to prepare some remarks for this address. I was walking outside
> in the garden attempting to organize my thoughts when I stumbled over
> a stone in the ground. To my surprise as I picked myself up I saw that
> it had an inscription chiselled into it. With some difficulty I
> deciphered it; it began
> "Here on this spot in the year 1500 an International Conference was held".
>
> It seems that a group of people had gotten together to discuss the
> problems posed by the numbers of art masterpieces being fabricated
> throughout the world; at that time it was a very flourishing industry.
> They thought it would be appropriate to find out if this process could
> be "scientificized" so they held the "International Working Conference
> on Masterpiece Engineering" to discuss the problem.
>
> As I continued walking round the garden, now looking a little closer
> at the ground, I came across the bones of a group, still in session,
> attempting to write down the criteria for the design of the "Mona
> Lisa". The sight reminded me strangely of our group working on the
> criteria for the design of an operating system.
>
> Apparently the Conference decided that it should establish an
> Institute to work in more detail on production problems in the
> masterpiece field. So they went out into the streets of Rome and
> solicited a few chariot drivers, gladiators and others and put them
> through a five week (half-day) masterpiece creation course; then they
> were all put into a large room and asked to begin creating.
>
> They soon realized that they weren't getting much efficiency out of
> the Institute, so they set about equipping the masterpiece workers
> with some more efficient tools to help them create masterpieces. They
> invented power-driven chisels, automatic paint tube squeezers and so
> on but all this merely produced a loud outcry from the educators: "All
> these techniques will give the painters sloppy characteristics", they
> said.
>
> Production was still not reaching satisfactory levels so they extended
> the range of masterpiece support techniques with some further steps.
> One idea was to take a single canvas and pass it rapidly from painter
> to painter. While one was applying the brush the others had time to
> think.
>
> The next natural step to take was, of course, to double the number of
> painters but before taking it they adopted a most interesting device.
> They decided to carry out some proper measurement of productivity. Two
> weeks at the Institute were spent in counting the number of brush
> strokes per day produced by one group of painters, and this criterion
> was then promptly applied in assessing the value to the enterprise of
> the rest. If a painter failed to turn in his twenty brush strokes per
> day he was clearly under-productive.
>
> Regrettably none of these advances in knowledge seemed to have any
> real impact on masterpiece production and so, at length, the group
> decided that the basic difficulty was clearly a management problem.
> One of the brighter students (by the name of L. da Vinci) was
> instantly promoted to manager of the project, putting him in charge of
> procuring paints, canvases and brushes for the rest of the
> organisation.
>
> Well, for all I know, the Institute may still be in existence. I leave
> you with one thought: in a few hundred years, somebody may unearth our
> tape recordings on this spot and find us equally ridiculous.
>
>
> --
> Henrique Rabelo de Andrade
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