Entry #109
- Listening to:
- Telemann, Overture in F major, Alster Overture.
This features a wonderfully dissonant movement called Die
concertidenden Frösche (und) Krähen, the
concert of frogs and crows. This has a very effective
representation of the cawing of crows and the croaking of frogs.
I can hear crows loudly circling, spiralling, and making a
terrible racket. It's not just 20th century music that has to
be dissonant. (Telemann's dates are 1681-1767, so he was
contemporary of Bach, Handel and Scarlatti.)
The research fellowship employing me at
St. Catharine's College in
Cambridge has the theme
specification. I was therefore
very interested to see
Joel on
Software do a series of articles on this very subject this week.
The
first
is the best; it's entitled
Why bother?. The reason I
like this one most is because the reasons for doing a specification
that he identifies apply to all forms of specification. In the
subsequent articles, Joel talks about the sort of specification he
means. It comes down to
When you design a product, inside and out, the
most important thing is to nail down the user experience. What are the
screens, how do they work, what do they do.
To my mind, not every piece of useful software has screens, or even
much of a user experience. Is the IDE the most important part of a
compiler to specify? An interesting experiment in UI design in my
field is
Jape,
"a framework for building Interactive Proof Editors". It's
interesting, but I wouldn't want to use it prove anything.
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