The "Creative Class" of today

A sequence of unrelated things including a talk in which the speaker mentioned how still today the most important software in the world is written by only 5% of all programmers and his mentioning of "Halstead length" and a post by a software programmer who emigrated from Russia and mentioned the actual term "Creative Class" led to this post.

The "Creative Class" of today, the inventors of software are not unlike the past creative class of writers, composers and painters. The essential human qualities and characteristics needed, the process of creation as well as the product have similarities. A person or people have to be able to imagine something that is unique and appealing in a very direct way to a lot of people. A writer has to come up with a unique story line, a composer with a sequence of tones that not only have not been arranged in exactly the same way before but that also evoke something immediate and "hardwired" in the listener.

An app inventor or designer of a new piece of software (larger apps, really) does the same thing - what they dream up has to be sufficiently different to be unique and has to appeal directly to a lot of people.

And here comes the key part though - I could imagine a neat story line but my novel would not be nowhere near a William Gibson work or that of Tolstoy. We all have moments with Apps when we say "why didn't I think of that?"

The point is that even if we did, there would still be that craft part, the part of being really good at something that the best among the Creative Class have. It takes talent and then perfection of that talent through practice and that for me makes a great composer, or a great writer more similar to a great programmer than one would have thought.

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