## paul a. fishwick ### university of florida
he talks about text-based aesthetics… does that correspond to literature?
metaphors used in software: - “looping around a section” - “walking through code” - “piping X into Y” - “forking” - etc.
but his issue is that none of these have been made visual, there all just cognitive or conjectural, and exist as mental models. he says that you can only have aesthetics qualities if you free those mental models from your mind, “trapped inside complex software representations”.
finite state machine as metaphor
static vs. dynamic
his actual grasp of aesthetic is limited to “choose between Magritte and Kandinsky”, but his point of aesthetics being needed to grasp the metaphor is useful.
the metaphor he proposes is that of the business floor, with people queueing for different booths. it echoes von neumann’s statement that a computer is just bureaucracy.
the Unified Modeling Language is more about software engineering than programming. in general, there is definitely a difference between those two, programming being a lower-level, hands-on version of engineering.
another paradigm: programming by example
he argues that there is no absolute intrinsic value in minimal representation; “it is one of the many aesthetic points in a magnificently large space of possibilities”
references to constructivism and bauhaus