Creativity and Discipline

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When I got out of school, I thought I was the best programmer in the world. I could write an unbeatable tic-tac-toe program, use five different computer languages, and create 1000-line programs that WORKED (really!). Then I got out into the Real World. My first task in the Real World was to read and understand a 200,000-line Fortran program and then speed it up by a factor of two. Any Real Programmer will tell you that all the Structured Coding in the world won't help you solve a problem like that—it takes actual talent.

—Ed Post

It's hard to explain to a fresh computer-science graduate why you need conventions and engineering discipline. When I was an undergraduate, the largest program I wrote was about 500 lines of executable code. As a professional, I've written dozens of utilities that have been smaller than 500 lines, but the average main-project size has been 5,000 to 25,000 lines, and I've participated in projects with over a half million lines of code. This type of effort requires not the same skills on a larger scale, but a new set of skills altogether.

Some creative programmers view the discipline of standards and conventions as stifling to their creativity. The opposite is true. Can you imagine a website on which each page used different fonts, colors, text alignment, graphics styles, and navigation clues? The effect would be chaotic, not creative. Without standards and conventions on large projects, project completion itself is impossible. Creativity isn't even imaginable. Don't waste your creativity on things that don't matter. Establish conventions in noncritical areas so that you can focus your creative energies in the places that count.

In a 15-year retrospective on work at NASA's Software Engineering Laboratory, McGarry and Pajerski reported that methods and tools that emphasize human discipline have been especially effective (1990). Many highly creative people have been extremely disciplined. "Form is liberating," as the saying goes. Great architects work within the constraints of physical materials, time, and cost. Great artists do, too. Anyone who has examined Leonardo's drawings has to admire his disciplined attention to detail. When Michelangelo designed the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he divided it into symmetric collections of geometric forms, such as triangles, circles, and squares. He designed it in three zones corresponding to three Platonic stages. Without this self-imposed structure and discipline, the 300 human figures would have been merely chaotic rather than the coherent elements of an artistic masterpiece.

A programming masterpiece requires just as much discipline. If you don't try to analyze requirements and design before you begin coding, much of your learning about the project will occur during coding and the result of your labors will look more like a three-year-old's finger painting than a work of art.