Viswanathan K's Thoughts

You’d think that the famous poet, Lord Byron, a playboy to boot, would marry for love. Instead he married Annabella Milbanke in a “rare display of reason over romanticism”, writes Walter Isaacson in Innovators as a way to “pay off his burdensome debts”. The marriage then was doomed from the start (even more due to the wavelength mismatch: his wife was tutored in maths!), and they divorced after the birth of their daughter Ada, later famous as Lady Ada Lovelace, the “software” brain behind Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine. Ada thus had both poetry and math in her genes, a combo that deeply influenced her approach to computing machines. As I wrote in an earlier blog , she thought a computing machine could “store, manipulate, process and act upon anything that could be expressed in symbols”, not just numbers . She wrote: “(Such a computing machine) might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity.” Poetical science: she was indeed (both) ...

Technology and the arts. Sounds like one of those “never the twain shall meet” cases, right? While that is indeed true an overwhelmingly large amount of the time, every now and then someone joins the two and the result is pure magic. Steve Jobs said it perfectly with the perfect image in the background : “We’ve always tried to be at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. To be able to get the best of both. To make extremely advanced products from a technology point of view, but also have them be intuitive easy-to-use, fun-to-use, so that they really fit the users.” Apple’s VP of Design, Jony Ive, on the iPad: “The face of the product is pretty much defined by a single piece of multi-touch glass. And that’s it. There’s no pointing device. There’s isn’t even a single orientation. There’s no up, there’s no down. There’s no right way of holding it. I don’t have to change myself to change the product. It fits me.” So why don’t more companies aim for this tech-a...

My mom has frequently wondered if the non-science/maths jobs would start paying more in today’s economy as the nature and number of jobs increases. But with “software eating the world” (see my earlier blog ), I feel the opposite will happen: the demand for software knowledge will increase and the software industry will continue to disrupt most other parts of the economy. And by extension, jobs in those parts of the economy. Now, don’t get me wrong: software development rarely needs great science or maths knowledge, but companies still hire only engineers as software developers. (My guess as to why that happens is that companies feel that if you’re an engineer, you must have had the discipline to slog your way through school and college; and discipline and hard-work are welcome in all industries). Allen Pike writes that writing software used to be a job, not an art: “Programming hasn’t traditionally been thought of as a medium of creative expression…Software has historicall...