Sondheim, Seurat and Software: finding art in code
summary
Argues software mixes art, craft and engineering with concrete examples: Seurat’s pointillism becomes an analogy for composition, Sondheim’s musical ran 25 performances with only the last three including Act II, and language defaults matter—C# methods default private/non-virtual while Java defaults package/virtual, which hides design choices. Shows practical tools: Noda Time forces explicit date/time types and is production‑ready, LINQ and async/await compose naturally, and semantic versioning has subtle breaking cases (allowing null can break callers). Urges deliberate API visibility, documented decisions and team diversity as harmony.
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chapters (19)
- 0:00Diversity
- 1:16Introduction
- 3:19Seurat
- 5:31Sunday in the Park with George
- 10:20Not all software is engineering
- 11:09Art and code
- 18:02Fellini
- 19:59Design
- 21:54Decisions
- 26:15Versioning
- 29:30Decision making
- 39:08Composition
- 40:51Composition in software
- 41:45Regular composition
- 45:05Functional composition
- 46:58Tension and balance
- 50:56Light and shade
- 53:29Harmony
- 58:14Conclusion
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