Well, there are a number of issues here. In the first place, they're
looking at code for particular reasons, to understand it in particular
ways; code as literature or as part-objects within literature (codework)
is not meant to be decoded the same way. Think of counting the number of
"t"s for example in a poem - that's also a way of decoding it, but is of
course different than literary reading. I think there's a hermeneutics
involved here, as well as the Wittgensteinian idea of "family of usages" -
so who is looking at the code/codework, for what purpose, and so forth?
It's problematic; since code is primarily originating with programmers,
they're interested in its functionality, taking it apart, but that's not
it's only function, certainly not within the aegis of literature. An
interesting aside to this of course is reading a mathematical text, which
I think _can_ be a work of literature fairly directly - for example
Einstein's theory of relativity. One's reading speeds and slows, and the
formulas require decoding as well, but of a different sort, I think; I
also feel that, say, cosmological formulas are denser and more layered,
more difficult to unravel perhaps, than most programming code - but I may
well be mistaken here (and should take this whole sentence back!).
- Alan
On Thu, 23 Jan 2014, marc garrett wrote:
Code Is Not Literature - or is it?
I was browsing Slashdot as one does and found a link to an article called
?Code Is Not Literature?.
As I was reading this I was thinking of Mez and Alan Sondheim, and thought to
myself - surely, if someone turns it into literature, then it is literature?
Anyway, have a read and see what you think?
"Hacker and author Peter Seibel has done a lot of work to adopt one of the
most widely-accepted practices toward becoming a better programmer: reading
high quality code. He's set up code-reading groups and interviewed other
programmers to see what code they read. But he's come to learn that the
overwhelming majority of programmers don't practice what they preach. Why? He
says, 'We don't read code, we decode it. We examine it. A piece of code is
not literature; it is a specimen.' He relates an anecdote from Donald Knuth
about figuring out a Fortran compiler, and indeed, it reads more like a
'scientific investigation' than the process we refer to as 'reading.' Seibel
is now changing his code-reading group to account for this: 'So instead of
trying to pick out a piece of code and reading it and then discussing it like
a bunch of Comp Lit. grad students, I think a better model is for one of us
to play the role of a 19th century naturalist returning from a trip to some
exotic island to present to the local scientific society a discussion of the
crazy beetles they found.'"
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/14/01/21/1847217/code-is-not-literature
Here?s Seibel?s original text on his blog
http://www.gigamonkeys.com/code-reading/
wishing you well.
marc
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