tangophilia blog

Reusable code is another great property of good programming languages and Argentine Tango. Once you find your favorite pieces of code (say a really efficient parser, or a great boleo combination), you can choose when and where to insert it. You know exactly what it does, how it works, and how best to modify it.

It could be a code/combination that you copied from another source, then modified as your own. It could be something that you wrote from scratch, and even if it does the same thing as a similar piece of code written by somebody else, it\’s still your creation. Once you develop your personal style of dancing/coding, people will see the hallmarks of your style in the choices you make and the pieces of code that you choose to reuse and optimize.

If you share that code with others, then others can observe it, learn from it, alter it, and even attribute it to you. \”Dancer F taught a step to Dancer D. Even though F rarely used it himself, D loved it so much he made it one of his signature steps. F taught me combination Z, but then I modified to Z3X to match my style. Meanwhile, I had been tinkering with idea C, and F solved it by turning it into combination M.\” This kind of thing happens all the time in the Tango (and open-source programming) world, and it\’s a process that feeds continuous innovation and enrichment for the art and its practitioners.

This is going to be a lot more meaningful to you if you\’ve got some kind of experience with programming. For the technically minded, one of the convenient things about tango is that you can debug iteratively. Your ability to take advantage of this depends a lot on how you choose to think about tango.

If you\’re focused mostly on memorized patterns (the more traditional method of learning and thinking about social dances), then dancing is like programming in a compiled language (like C). You have to write chunks of your program completely, then compile to binary, then execute, then read cryptic error messages, then make a change somewhere, then compile, then execute, repeat as necessary. If you\’re lucky, then you have access to some well-documented source code and a good IDE to simplify the process of debugging. But very often, you\’re looking at fairly large chunks of code and procedures trying to find out exactly where in the chain things are going wrong.

For me, working with Argentine Tango is a lot closer to writing in Perl or PHP. These are interpreted rather than compiled, and can be written and executed almost on the fly. You can see the output of single lines or control loops simply by adding print statements anywhere you want to check what\’s going on. If the problem seems too large, it\’s trivial to extract a small piece of code, simplify it and build it back up again to something more complex. Even better, you get your results almost in real-time which makes it easier to rapidly prototype, tweak and improve the code you\’re working on.
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