On creativity

[kaberett]

Some time ago, I asked you what you thought of prompted by "creativity", then utterly failed to engage in conversation or to explain why I was asking.

So: I had been having the kind of evening, you see, where one ends up on a train with one's programmer partner, the both of you dressed in pinstripes, very earnestly attempting to convince aforementioned partner that coding is a creative endeavour... by means of quoting Robert Frost. As it turns out, this gets you pretty strange looks from everyone around you.

And then, more recently, I went on a course entitled Doing Creative Research, which did not change my mind on anything - I was already in firm agreement - but did lead me to Medawar, and the assertion that there is poetry in science, but there is also a lot of book-keeping.

I don't see my science and my poetry as having any fundamental differences. With both I am trying to find new stuff, be that data or forms of expression; with both I rely on intuition to keep my footing, to find my path.

At the Doing Creative Research course we talked, a lot, about the two cultures: about creativity being constructed as flighty, as arty, as distinct from "rigorous" science: about the ways in which scientists shy away from describing themselves as creative because of these perceived connotations of unreliability; which is heartbreaking, really.

So where am I at, at the moment, which what I think creativity is? Making something from nothing, yes, but also: I think I view it as a skillset, as a process, that can be learned; rather than something either intrinsic (a creative person) or extrinsic (a flash of inspiration). And: I think it is about bravery, and trust in oneself, and willingness to take risks in the knowledge that one will be resilient if they do not work as hoped.

Something that That One Gentleman and I disagreed on (or at least, of which I have not yet convinced him) is that making good choices can be in and of itself creative, specifically in the context of writing beautiful and elegant code (but also, really, of anything else). I am thinking of the study I have heard tell of - but never tracked down - that asked amateur and expert chess players to look at a board laid out in front of them and write down all possible moves; the amateurs listed more, because the grandmasters didn't see the bad moves.

I think that probably I wanted to say more on this, but that's what I've the brain for right now; I would love love love to hear your views. <3

Comments

[kaberett]

Right, I have now had some more of a chat elsewhere with That One Gentleman, and with his permission am copying (with some formatting) some of his stuff (not least because I'd really like to sit you two down in a pub sometime and watch what happened!):

As I think I said at the time, it comes down to a semantic distinction. If creative means that you create something out of nothing (emptiness, blank space no content) then I'd agree that I'm creative. If it means imaginative then no. If you asked which meaning I'd associate with 'creative' then it'd be the latter. I really don't use imagination in programming.

There's the small stuff where you don't have many choices and everything is a logical progression towards a complete whole. With the bigger stuff I feel it's an extension of the smaller stuff that depends on being able to see how the small stuff plays out in a larger whole - much like chess.

I think that the willingness to fail is distinct from the imaginative/creative thing. That, to me, is a confidence issue. And sometimes a shortcut. Sometimes an experiment is just faster than completely working through the theory, and either approach would work.

I think that starting from the empty file/blank canvas gives the most choices, but those choices are not completely free. They are bounded by rules and breaking those rules is not new and visionary, it just means that the product you are engineering won't work.

[...]

Anyway, the blank canvas thing. The choices are not free. They are more comparable to chess openings. They are arguably the most important decisions and the hardest to understand the implications of, but it's all set inside a structured rigid framework that prescribes what is and is not possible. I would say that this argument applies to choices of which programming language to use, or whether to write your own. Even if you write your own then you are still trying to understand the full range of ways that the end result will be used and accommodate all of those cases as best you can, possibly with focus in particular areas (depending on what problem the new language is trying to solve).

In English you could decide to omit full stops and capital letters, and you could still be understood. If you omit parens in (most) programming then it would not work at all. Probably would not compile. Similarly, you could choose to break that rule and put all words in a sentence in alphabetical order, introducing a whole new kind of ambiguity that you could potentially do interesting things with. That, to me, is the essence of a creative act that you can't do in coding.

Aha, followed up with: And until writing code that won't compile has _any_ conceivable value (except as a demonstraiton of how not to..) I will feel that coding is not creative. Which is probably starting to get a ta thing that I can argue against more effectively, once I've had a chance to mull it over. ;)

[flippac]

There's a quote, about the same age as me, that goes like so:

"programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute"

It's not unknown to write code for which no compiler or interpreter yet exists if you're in my end of compsci.