A Little Off
My Flash artist dabs and squints:
Trial and error is right for an artist. Picture Renoir dabbing at his picture and stepping back to squint at it, over and over.
Drawing That worked for drawing and painting, for years.
Scripts That even worked for scripts, when those were ten-line scripts in ActionScript 2, and she could find an example to start from.
XML But now she buys components for the price of dinner and wine, and configures them with XML. XML is unforgiving. A little off, and you’re left with nothing, a wild nonsense. Dab and squint rarely works.
Yes, she could validate and test her work, step by step, as programmers do. But that leaves behind the dab-and-squint she loves. She makes a clockwork of colors that coil and cog and turn. Could she work with angle brackets and descriptive words instead? Sure. Without joy, though, for her or us.