Daniele Procida
The naïve programmer

Discussion: Issue #171

Since Picasso encountered Henri Rousseau over a century ago, modern art has been acutely aware of the value of the contributions that the naïve artist can make. Art negotiates the relationship between sophistication and naïvety with care and intelligence. What does our programming culture make of the naïve programmer? What can programming gain or learn from this encounter? The naïve programmer is simply an unsophisticated programmer. Nobody is born sophisticated. Even the most sophisticated programmers were once naïve programmers. What’s more, the adoption of programming simply as a tool to solve immediate problems, by ever more people without any formal training, means that the number of naïve programmers will become greater, not less. Are we ready for this? This talk will explore the relationship, illuminating it with examples from the world of painting, art and music, and will offer some lessons that our own industry and culture should be ready to learn from.

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