Why I Suck At Programming

This blog topic was triggered by a discussion I was having with one of my friends who is trying to learn website programming. I think it's a sad fact that as of about 10 years ago, suddenly all graphic designers have to be web developers. 

The Rise of Flash

This was a gradual industry shift that occurred in the midst of my education; between the time I entered high school and when I graduated from college.  It was in the early years of the last decade, I think somewhere around 2001-2003 or so (still can't believe that 2003 was a full decade ago. I am in denial of how old I'm getting)  When websites started to evolve from the static, text- and image-based pages to the colorful, interactive and media-integrated miracles we see today. 

All this started in 1998 when the FutureSplash company created "Flash," which was later bought out by Macromedia. It was a new standard in animation that didn't rely on the simple frame-by-frame graphics, like the animated GIF. (And for any of you that still use Myspace...I'm sorry. Animated GIFs are butt-ugly and a relic of the 20th century. Sparkly names and hopping bunny rabbits aren't glamorous, they're annoying and distracting.)

Using Flash, instead of drawing out an animation frame by frame and pixel by pixel, you could draw an object in its beginning and ending state, and use a "tween" animation created by specific programming language called Actionscript to tell the object what to do. This is the basis for all modern websites.

In the beginning, Flash was limited in application, and Flash objects were inserted into a page like images. Now it's possible to create an entire website structure in Flash, with trippy animations and fun little cartoony effects.  An entire subculture has sprung up around Flash-created cartoons on the internet, because *supposedly* it makes animation easier than it has ever been before.

Example: The staple of our internet youth: Nyancat.

Well, I beg to differ.

Why Programming is Not My Friend

I for one, absolutely hate flash.  I think by some miracle, they managed to invent something less intuitive than HTML coding.  I tried to learn both HTML and Actionscript in school, and I failed miserably.  Part of this could be my learning disability. I have very poor math skills, and IQ tests also determined I am bad at coding. The simple "1-2-3/A-B-C" code we learn in grade school was almost too much for me to wrap my head around.  (By that code I mean A=1, B=2, C=3, etc)

I am not a math-oriented person.  Numbers and complex equations make me want to cry. If you gave me a printed page of HTML code or Javascript, I'd probably look at it as if it was written in Klingon, or some occult language from an ancient Necronomicon written by an evil dark wizard. It looks like pure gibberish to me, and the more I try to understand it the more stubbornly my brain rejects it.  I mean, look at the title I chose for this webpage. I Think In Pictures. Not in abstract numbers and formulas, thank you very little.

The sheer amount of work involved in coding simple animations is staggering.  An entire paragraph of Actionscript will yield little more than a red rectangle that moves back and forth across the screen, turns purple and quacks like a duck when you click on it.

That was what they taught me in school.  A button that quacks. Why I would ever want to make a color-changing quack button is beyond me.

And HTML is also the bane of my existence.

I managed to learn some basic HTML by reverse-engineering other websites. By that I mean going to a webpage, clicking on "view source" and seeing all the pages of code sprawling across the screen. After many hours of careful experimentation, I discovered that by tweaking numbers in certain variables, and removing certain tags in critical locations, I could take a beautifully functioning website and turn it into a glitchy, jumbled nightmare of broken links, missing image placeholders and 404 errors.  Not unlike my first portfolio webpage! (Wish I was joking but I'm not.)

I had one web-dev teacher who described the HTML side of Dreamweaver as the "Rosie O'Donnell" side. The one that's working in the background, but not to pretty to look at and hopefully able to be ignored as long as it's doing its job.  It's like the guts inside of our bodies. They're squishy, slimy and gross, but as long as they do what they need to do, we can go on living without knowing what lies beneath our skin.

Looking at Flash is sort of like looking at boobs. Boobs are wonderful and perfect, beautiful to look at and fun to play with. They're round, bouncy, jiggly and gravity-defying. While scripting is like the yucky insides. The bloated sacs of fat, pulsing blood vessels and water-filled silicon implants underneath the surface that we don't need or want to know about. It's the skeleton in the closet.

Programming code is not pretty.  And they won't let you get your Graphic Design Bachelor's Degree of Useless Nonpaying Liberal Arts(TM) without it.

With all the software innovations we have today, why is coding even necessary for putting together a basic webpage?  Can't we just "drag and drop" predetermined snippets of code into our pages and draw the shapes with invisible arrows telling them where we want them to go? Or corner handles on boxes to let us resize a table or section to anything we want?  Adobe Illustrator can do that.  If Dreamweaver is capable of doing that, nobody taught me how to use it that way. 

Every course I try to take in Dreamweaver; every book I read about it makes it sound like all those buttons and menus are just for show.  And people still make webpages in a text editor and paste it into a browser like they've been doing since 1994. It's like "Here, son... we'll let you get your driver's license. But first, help me put your car together with these complicated instructions and exploded parts diagrams written in Japanese..."