[Rio-pm] Software como Arte

Henrique Rabelo de Andrade henrique.andrade em uniriotec.br
Segunda Novembro 26 12:29:49 PST 2007


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.


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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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