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RubyConf AU 2016: Did you know that Shakespeare wrote almost no direction into his plays? No fight direction. No staging. No notes to the songs. Of the 1700 words he created, there was no official dictionary. That’s right the author of some of the greatest literary works in history, which were filled with situational complexity, fight sequences and music, include NO documentation! How did he do it? In this talk, we're going "thee and thou." I'm going to give you a crash course in how: Shakespeare writes software.
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In Adam Cuppy’s talk "What If Shakespeare Wrote Ruby?" from RubyConf AU 2016, he draws a captivating parallel between Shakespeare's writing and software development, challenging the audience to find joy in their work. Cuppy, a former actor, starts by sharing his background and his passion for amplifying greatness and joy through performance and software development. He highlights Shakespeare’s ability to create complex narratives and characters with minimal documentation, posing the intriguing question of how this approach could be applied to writing software. Key Points Discussed: - **The Power of Language**: Cuppy emphasizes the significance of language and poetry in both Shakespeare's writing and programming, asserting that both are expressive forms of communication. - **Shakespeare’s Documentation-less Writing**: Cuppy points out that Shakespeare had no formal documentation for his plays but was able to convey depth and richness instead through his mastery of language. Shakespeare created over 800,000 words, including 1,700 new word forms, showing the levels of creativity possible without explicit stage directions. - **Acting is Reacting**: A critical concept introduced is that in acting, each line is a reaction to what has come before it, suggesting that software development can similarly involve responding to prior code. - **Performance Demonstration**: Cuppy engages the audience with a performance of a scene from "Romeo and Juliet" to illustrate his points about expressiveness, engagement, and the requirement for actors to listen actively. - **Expressive Convention in Programming**: He likens the need for clear communication in Shakespeare’s texts to the importance of having a shared understanding in software teams. By utilizing consistent conventions in programming, developers can create code that others can understand and modify. - **The Role of Empathy in Development**: Cuppy concludes with the notion that focus should not just be on the technology (machines) but also on the people (humans) who create and maintain it, reinforcing the idea that joy and teamwork are vital in the software development process. Concluding Takeaways: Cuppy encourages programmers to think like poets and artisans. He invites them to embrace the complexity and artistry of software development in the same way Shakespeare embraced the craft of playwriting. His main message is that joy in work can lead to innovative solutions within coding and software development.
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