First get all the notes right

I have a friend at work who, I realized yesterday, speaks a computer science as pure and courtly as Castillian Spanish.

"Wait," I said abruptly, after he had spoken for an hour uninterrupted. "I just hit the end of my queue. I have to walk to digest." "Good," he said. When I returned, the stream picked up and continued. It was harder for me now; denser constructs, just as fast.

I have known this language since I was 19. How you think about the thinking is part of the training.

When I listen, I am simultaneously aware of the phenomenally rigorous structure within the argument, and the vaccuum outside it. While part of me tracks the structure, most of me seeks the edges and beyond -- looking for what's not there, or forgotten, or missing from the starting assumptions. When they start citing the seed principles, I shiver, feel flashes of heat. I can sense the greater correctness of those, the greater potential energy.

I am calmed and cleansed by orderly thought. It's as immersive as listening to Bach, or diving into cold water on a hot day. I stand beside a waterfall in the spray -- a dazzling amount of power, which is not mine, in whose proximity I delight, thunders past.

As with systems of mathematics, however, I'm always aware there are alternative systems of thought.

The ordered and the organic are two faces of god.

Last night, instead of game designers murmuring in my dreams, I heard Boon's soft eliding voice: Parent nodes and child nodes... not a well-formed language... can be an element or an attribute... an instance of the class... inherent in the object... verified... distributed... identifiable... procedural...

Washing dishes today, I realized that we DO have classical education in our country. It's technical. The computer scientists who taught me were as implacable as the pianists.

Piano and software are both based on rigor: First get all the notes right. Then learn to play.