Lindsay,
I think that the role of creativity in programming is vastly
overestimated.
I have to disagree, I think it is vastly underestimated.
This is only because you live in a world (ie, academia)
here the aim is to be creative.
Most algorithms are very simple and frequently used.
In fact developers seem to have a small repertoire of techniques
they use most of the time.
Which is also what composers do (since that has been used already, but also
painters - a better analogy in IMHO). It's what makes your style.
My contribution to the numbers program is 1,000 lines of
dull code. I say no point spending time to make it
interesting to read. The only code that readers might
find interesting was not written by me. I needed a hash
table library and so found the source of one
via the web, plus a hash function written by somebody else.
I have found various other source libraries that might be of use
to me and I plan to continue to write dull code.
For instance, 'numbers' is a project I am currently working on
The creative part of this project is figuring out what constitutes
an interesting number and how it might best be matched against.
The code is trivial, as it is in most commercial projects.
--
Derek M. Jones tel: +44 (0) 1252 520 667
Knowledge Software Ltd mailto:de...@knosof.co.uk
Source code analysis http://www.knosof.co.uk
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