Craft

I've been ruminating on craft – a.k.a. craftsmanship. [If I refer to someone as a craftsman, please do not imagine I am saying or assuming anything about their genitalia – or, indeed, about any other characteristic of them that would be a distraction from the discourse.] It's a topic I've discussed with my programmer friends and includes generic truths that yield fruitful discussions with my elder brother (James, antique watch wright) and my friend Kim, a civil engineer. Along with other denizens of chaos, I have an avowed intent to articulate any useful thoughts I can muster on the topic.

I aim to explore the form in which craft appears for me, as a toolwright: I leave it to hackers to identify any commonality between this and hackerdom – and, indeed, to decide whether to call me a hacker. As for hackers, so for practitioners of any kindred craft.

Extant fragments (all, like this page, waiting until I know how to improve them):

Toys

• My take on Jim Propp's self-referential aptitude test.
• An implementation of the cellular automaton John Horton Conway invented and named life.
• A solver for Su Doku.
• A solver for substitution ciphers.

Ramblings

• why security analysts should publish exploit code.
• guilds, from the perspective of utility.
• Hackers and cross-talk on Eric Raymond's essay Homesteading the Noosphere.
• An examination of algorithmic complexity when computing Fibonacci's sequence
• A talk about a few decades in computing.
• A talk on the care and feeding of make.

Explorations

• Playing with python and thoughts related to just how powerful a language one could build along similar lines …
• Thoughts on the design of a text editor.
• My (antique) sundry library and its spin-offs – assorted C code which I have found useful. I describe them, though incompletely, and leave you to care whether they would serve you well. If you want the code of these or of the shepherd (below), drop me a line and I'll package it up for you when I have the time. But they really need re-written (in python, probably).
• The shepherd, a library built on the above; a crude generic system for implementing evolutionary problem-solving – which I would need to rewrite before doing much more with it.

Warning

Your mileage may vary

Keep It Straightforward, Simpleton

Straightforward needn't be naïve – it provides facilities which it makes sense to use straightforwardly, allows that these may be used otherwise, but specifies how it will respond in such plain terms as to leave it as clear as even these cases could hope for – just like python, in fact. While keeping things simple is generaly a Good Thing, making something useful needs to allow for non-simple things.

Maintained by Eddy.