The Thinking Programmer

I was reading Edward de Bono 's Serious Creativity yesterday. The key insight that occured to me is that deBono discusses "thinking tools" which are formal structure one uses for thinking through a problem or focus area.

Later i wrote some code for the Ruby port of HotDraw (implementing double buffering to eliminate the nasty flicker when Figures move on the DrawingView). When iwrote a test and then wrote teh supporting code, it struck me!

Programming is thinking too.

You "think in" a programming paradigm/language combination instead of in a human language but is is still thinking. And every one of deBono's thinking tools should be applicable to programming. .

And when you are programming without needing to think, then you are basically doing "manual labor".

I need to investigate this idea further ...

And today , I am doing some really dumb XML->XSL->PDF transformations,inspecting the finished doc visually to make sure that every dot is where its is supposed to be.Yes i know someone needs to do it but it'snot really very exciting work(to say the least).

Yuck, back to work....