Art, Life and Programming: Programming

Earlier, we talked about how programmers weren’t perhaps what you expect. Code isn’t either. Programmers used to program using series of 1’s and 0’s punched into cards (crikey!) but that’s not the case any more.

Program code has got more and more high level, and some languages are actually quite readable by humans! Some programming can even be done using drag and drop.

Programming is really just a way of thinking. More and more people are becoming programmers, some of them without realizing that’s what they’re doing.

Images from www.alice.org

You can learn to program using The Sims – isn’t that awesome? It’s a great initiative called Alice.

Image used with permission of Kelvin Schutz

More and more video games come with programming capabilities, Warcraft is another example.

There are also programs such as Game Maker or Fusion that allow you to create video games without writing any code – you just have to learn to think logically!

This is relatively simple to create, and doesn’t require much code. It’s recursive, which means we split it into the same problem again and again and again – until we reach something really small and easily solved – in this case by drawing and filling in a square.

That’s pretty short, hey?

This is something I’m working on currently, what I try to do is take some of the huge volume of information we’re presented with every day and make it into something that’s both pretty and useful. For instance, this shows the size and interactions in my Twitter network.

We can also write programs to extract important information from the noise. Here, this graph picks out my core, central network.

The “hard” part of the code is just 6 lines!

Imagine how difficult it would be to create these things by hand!

Credit: flickr / Vermin Inc

Technology has changed our lives considerably relatively recently – we have new and impressive “hardware” and creative and innovating programming. This is just the begining – there’s much more to come.

Technologists – hardware designers, programmers – are at the center of what we will achieve next.

(Don’t you want to be part of that?)

Look around – changes are happening rapidly – in 15 years, you could be talking about what’s happened in your lifetime.

Be inspired! Human innovation is INCREDIBLE!

Push boundaries! Be limited only by your imagination.

Experiment!