“The computing scientist’s main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making.”
- Edsger W. Dijkstra
Overview
I’ve just added a new section to the website, located at emfred.com/programs. Here I will post articles that introduce various pieces of software that I’ve written over the years; topics covered may include the impetus for writing the program in question, details about its implementation, lessons learned from the programming process, and more. Each entry will also include a tutorial on how to install and use the program, so that an interested reader can get up and running as easily as possible.
All programs in the collection will be free and open source software, with the source code published on my Github page.
Motivation
When I started emfred.com (roughly a year ago during my Junior year of my Computer Science studies in college), I intended for it to be a place for me to post content about programming: things like tutorials on CS concepts, opinion-pieces on programming languages and paradigms, et cetera. A year in, however, and the site has turned out quite differently: rich with creative work (pieces of music, blog posts about music theory, book reviews) but lacking in technical material. I’m hoping that the new Programs section will be an excellent platform on which to fill this void, by offering up an appealing menu of free software of my own authorship, with well-wrought and enjoyable documentation to accompany.
Many of the projects which this website has given voice to are explicitly creative in nature, and the content-to-come about programs and related technical matters may seem to be of an opposing aspect. In my experience, though, software composition is creative in many of the same ways that traditional art-making is creative, namely that it’s fueled by a pursuit of elegance, eloquence, and depth of function. If I can manage to write the articles in the Programs section as well as I’d like to, then I think they’ll be (at least somewhat) convincingly illustrative of this point.
Banner image: “Beautiful photomechanical prints of Lotus” by Rijksmuseum is licensed under CC0 1.0 (public domain).
