Nov 9
The Zen of HTML and Legal Contracts
On the path of bootstrapping a startup, I’ve had a fair share of experience coding websites and drafting legal documents. These experiences have made me appreciate a side of both activities that I previously hadn’t thought much about:
Creativity within structure.
Coding and contracts are basically just languages – like any other language conceived by people. They each contain their own unique set of nouns, verbs, patterns, and nuances.
But coding and legal-ese are different from most in that they are characterized by extremely rigid formalities and limitations on usage. The purpose of this is to maintain some degree of consistency across each field.
You might think that a highly structured, uncompromising language takes away the author’s ability to be creative.
(And here’s where my realization comes:)
It doesn’t.
Ask an experienced web developer about “elegant code” and you’ll be treated to a passionate monologue about form and functionality, succinctness, and clean documentation.
I haven’t had a similar conversation with a lawyer (I can’t afford it), but my guess is that there is a similar reverence for the “elegant contract” – the one that uses a few words as possible to deliver the maximum effect, written in language that ordinary mortals can understand.
My present experience tells me that boundaries are actually conducive to creativity. Presented with limitations and challenges, smart individuals are going to find ways to make the best of what they have. And those results can oftentimes be beautiful.
The greater lesson here is that within every craft, there is an art form.
Within every seemingly mundane chore is a medium for expression.
It's just a choice we each have to make.
The way I usually explain coding to "classic creatives" (that is, non-technical areas generally lumped under "the arts", particularly fiction writing, musical or dramatic performance, and visual arts) is that it's like writing poetry to a very strict meter. The meter arguably limits creativity, in that you can't explore the complete space of possible arrangements of words (in the context of programming, there are a countably infinite number of ways of arranging text that aren't valid code), but through the limitation the underlying idea (algorithm) can be expressed to the viewer (both the computer's compiler/interpreter, and other human programmers). Similarly, in the arts, the creator is generally trying to evoke a particular emotion or thought in the viewer. Also, in both the arts and programming, a lot of the work you do is thrown away :oD.