'I'm like a sort of living carpet. I need a pattern, a design.
(...) Could one have the design without the carpet
(but this seemed like the smile without the Cheshire cat)?
Oliver Sachs, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat
I once said to my friend `managing people is a lot like programming` - one must take the work at hand and break it down into smaller, more readily achievable tasks; ideally, these must be such that they can be independently planned, coordinated and completed; the separate modules and their outputs must interface coherently with one another, and be scheduled and synchronised and aggregated into a working, meaningful solution; the people to whom they are assigned, much like technology, must be fit for purpose, have the abilities required for the job, be well understood, expressive. Perhaps the reasoning we apply to software engineering can be equally useful at trying to engineer the execution of a plan.
But wait. Programming is also a lot like putting together IKEA furniture: the assembling of complicated aggregate structures, out of confusingly numerous constituent parts, many of which incomprehensible in isolation, their coming together never obvious from the onset, and their composition - if ever at all possible - only achievable by the holding of the puzzle pieces all at once, like thoughts in one's working memory, a mind-boggling n-dimensional puzzle, all up in the air, in some impossible, gravity-defying edifice, until one suddenly gets a grasp of the whole and that last bolt or thought or detail, which hitherto lay unnoticed on the floor, suddenly and magically ties everything together.
And in fact programming is indeed very much like creative writing too, whose object is never the work of an orderly and structured weaving of one's thoughts, like the neat laying of bricks in the efficient erection of a building, but a Sisyphean struggle: a constant stretch, incessant tensing of one's mind against the pained, almost spasmodic clenching and explosion of one's thoughts - all to achieve that one, brief, precious, fragile flash of balance, when it all holds together, all at once, improbably suspended, into that splendid, always sought for, much desired something meaningful.
Who are we but the conceptual vocabularies within which we represent our world? And what is the world but the absolute, integral sum of these vocabularies? A beautiful, infinite, almighty Semantic Singularity, into the depths of which, lured by our yearn to understand, we will be irretrievably forgotten.
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