Creativity requires breaking out of the ruts of our minds. Working with the right person helps us to be creative because what seems normal to them is strange to us, and our usual way of working seems odd to them. Creative collaboration requires people to differ in some important way.

I certainly experienced that in several different ways over the last few weeks. The first example was my exploration into Ruby-based dependency injection. It was sparked by Jamis Buck’s presentation on Copland at RubyConf2004. I wrote up some ideas and Jamis took those bare ideas and fleshed them out into a real product (Needle) which represents the lightweight view of Dependency Injection. Evind Eklund also made some suggestions for improvements and the final result is something better that any of us would have come up with in isolation.

Another example happened this past month in the weeks after RubyConf. David Heinemeier Hansson has decided to include support for my XML Builder object in Rails. He mentioned to me that support for the processing instructions and declarations would be nice. I threw something together, but got some of the details wrong. Later that evening Rich Kilmer pops up an IM window and together we work out the rough spots in the design. Along the way, we come up with a cool way of supporting namespaces that fits well with the Builder style. It was a great session with each of us contributing and feeding off the ideas of the other.

I think Extreme Programming’s emphasis of pair programming is an attempt to tap into the creative potential of two different minds attacking a problem from different viewpoints. And it works fairly well at that. Now I’m wondering what other activities might benefit from the "two heads are better than one" approach. Maybe I’ll grab a friend and we will think about it together.

• Feedback

I can identify with that. I’ve downloaded most of my brain into Emacs macros so that I find it difficult to survive without a fully functional Emacs available. However, when it comes to editting Java code, it is tough to beat Eclipse (or IntelliJ/IDEA, or any number of similar IDEs). Although I still like Emacs for pure code/text entry, Eclipse really shines when you need to do browsing, refactoring or even CVS integration.

This is one gotcha, however. Whenever I save a file in Emacs, I hit

• Control-A (goto the beginning of the line), then
• Control-X Control-S (save a file).

Over the years I have learned that frequent saving is a good thing, and I perform that sequence of keystrokes without even thinking.

However, that same key combination in Eclipse performs …

• Control-A (select all)
• Control-X (cut selection)
• Control-S (save file)

Oops! Thankfully, Control-Z (undo) forgives all sins.