Code Is Clay

I wish the author could address whether or not people can buy a house and raise a family by making hypercubes. The potter was able to make cups and pots because that's what the people needed. In this future of manufactured ceramics the author envisions, what is the material reality who dedicated themselves to the craft of pottery? How many ceramic factories do we really need?

It's funny how it went from "everything needs to be strongly typed" and "even C++ isn't enough we need Rust for everything" to this...

A good chunk of our profession is just hype-followers at this point.

The title of this blog post immediately reminded me of "Big Ball of Mud":

http://laputan.org/mud/

Is clay like code?

Clay comes from the earth, has great plastic deformation properties, and when heated sufficiently it turns to ceramic--whereafter it can never be turned back to clay. We humans have been doing ceramics for over 30,000 years. Yet, there is no undo in the process of pottery, and much of the process requires experience to know, in the most inexact sense of knowing, what the result will actually look like. Clay exists as a physical medium, and while knowledge of chemistry and physics can certainly inform your usage of clay, in actuality the chemical interactions that occur during a firing are still complicated enough that we in the industry still refer to them as "kiln magic".

Programming, conversely, is primarily a logical thought experiment. Most of the programs I have written have almost no physical representation. There is no material to coding, even assembly programmers work at the top of a heap of mental and physical abstractions. The process itself is rife with tooling between the user and the medium, correcting our mistakes and suggesting alternative ideas. There is always very quick feedback as to the result of a program. And the field, although still full of open questions, is largely well specified, in spite of it being an incredibly young field of study!

As far as mediums for expression go it would, in my opinion, be rare to find two that are more different. I can't help but think of the old phrase, "the map is not the territory."

Imagine calling a circle a sphere. But a circle is 2D projection of a sphere.

I suppose we are comfortable calling a 3D projection of a hypercube by its 4D name because there really is no 4D context which we can readily slip into. That and no shorter name than "3D projection of a hypercube".

I'm not a mathematician and I'm certainly guilty of uncareful thinking. And I'm not certain that careful thinking and speech is always necessary.

Maybe I just missed the whole point of this article. I have a math fetish and IRL hobbies with my wife, now listen to what I have to say about what code and AI are up to?

Code is clay. Code is foam. Code is water. Code is paper. Code is wood.

Why can't it just be code? Is it that hard to conceptualize? Is the point of the article to rage-bait nerds by making a loose comparison that might not hold up under scrutiny?

Just grumbling in the hopes that someone else will grumble and I won't feel like the only one. My apologies to those who really needed to read this article and feel insulted by my take.

Sweet visuals! How'd you do them?

I feel that this article (like many other endeavors) has been derailed by the whole AI thing. Let's ignore that part.

The major point is that yes both clay and code are mediums for expression and they have advantages and drawbacks - for expression, for monetization, for utility and so on. I myself are quite interested in how these (and other) different mediums affect the author (artist/designer/potter/coder etc) in how they think, what they think about, and how that mediates their relation with the world around them - and indeed the consequent cultures emerging therein.

I'm an experienced software engineer and ceramicist and I enjoyed this essay. I have stuff to say.

There are some wonderful industrial ceramic designs, e.g. Royal Copenhagen. But most of it is cold. Despite that people still become attached to their factory-produced porcelain mugs, because we want our daily objects to be our life-companions. We demand certain qualities that lead to intimacy. Studio pottery is a direct line to these deeper relationships, so when people own studio pottery for the first time they rarely want to go back. It's a red pill moment.

Studio pottery is not a luxury. You can buy a mug from one of the finest potters in the world for £50, and you can buy a beautiful piece for £25-£30. These might bring years of pleasure, and that registers with our customers as fantastic value. So there are plenty of studio potters all over the world who make a living with their craft.

However the product of craft-produced code and AI-produced code are, for a customer, mostly the same. So my fear is that writing code by hand will become little more than a challenging and pleasurable distraction, like a big-brained version of solving sudoku, whereas making pottery will always have a value that outstrips it's factory-produced counterparts.

But I think there is a parallel between clay and code here. There are night-school potters who just love making and getting away from their fucking screens. I have love for every one of these people. And there are those who take it much further, who read the books and design the kilns, who wood-fire in shifts over many days, who study glaze chemistry, who create objects no one has imagined before. And in software there are the line-of-business enterprise coders, and often they're handle turners who would really rather be doing something else but there are those who take it much further, who read the books and language specs, who work on foundational open source tools and study compiler design, who create idioms and paradigms no one has yet conceived of.

All that's very interesting. But for me the commercial side is prosaic and a bit dull. The pleasures of both are the creativity, which is itself a way of re-enchanting my materialist and bewildering late-capitalist way of life.

I'm a coder, potter, and (sometimes) writer. This post is content-free, insight-free nonsense.

You can find parallels between any two things if you strain hard enough, but just listing them doesn't necessarily convey any new ideas.

Code is nothing like clay, and coding is nothing like potting.

images don't work

Actually, clay does not require an intellect, whereas code does. That's a world of difference. Code is vastly crude, relatively speaking, in that way.

> Honestly I think I'm going to like it more. I got into programming because I liked building things, not because I wanted to type boilerplate for the rest of my life.

Sounds to me like OP wanted to be the executive ordering his engineer team to build something rather than him being the engineer that actually builds it.

Also, "But clay didn't go away. Ceramics studios are everywhere now. People pay good money to throw pots on weekends.". What misguided statement. The population of full-time pottery workers didn't all open studios (likely a tiny percentage but it is more likely that the pottery studio people do not come from a pottery factory background) and those who opened them are likely not able to obtain a full-time equivalent level of income by catering to people like OP.

The article reads like a privileged person who lacks the ability to empathize with the disenfranchised.

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