On 26/01/14 01:36 PM, Bishop Zareh wrote: > > As a Programmer and as an Artist, I can tell you that I frequently > write Code as Literature, with the express intent of having it read > rather than executed. At first it came from what they called "airplane code." Before airplanes were connected to the internet, especially during the era of "enterprise computing" no code could be run on an airplane because the compiler was online, on vpn even. Yet programmers with good intuition and experience could still write, even during an 8-hour flight - all sans compiler. Airplane Code was not poetry; it was not meant to be read, but when the programmer's prediction of the compiler's reaction became unclear, programmers resorted to psuedo-code buried in comments, for their eyes only but none-the-less written in a hybrid language of intention and execution - a combination of what they wanted and what they thought could work. And then the programmers starting showing these psudeo-codes to each other.
Laptops with batteries that will last for most of a domestic flight have been commonly available since the 90s and compilers for Java or COBOL would run on them. If you wanted longer usage times, more batteries were available. Compilers at low levels of optimization are pretty deterministic. If we're talking about mainframe programming or integrating with server-side frameworks without decent mocks then that's what documentation is for. And if we're talking about pre-laptop AFK coding with pen and paper it's easy enough to write code in full that way. Psuedocode in that context would be more about DRY or documentation access than compiler issues. Programmers do write pseudocode to communicate, and may be forced to by management, but this has a history that is independent from the category or era(s) of enterprise computing. "A hybrid language of intention and execution" is code, not psuedocode. Code has to be run. Without running there is no execution and, with apologies to Lua and HyperTalk, by definition pseudocode does not run. This is the core problem of code poetry and code as literature. Software is written firstly for human beings to read, but formatting literature as code doesn't make it code and variable names tend not to be semantically significant to runtimes. There needs to be something meaningful in the code's execution in a literary way and this needs to relate to its syntax. > Then there comes Programming Education, where code tutorials are designed to be read by students, and the Open Source Community's tradition of having "well-commented source." Both with brilliant asides/insertions like "insert calculus here." These practices formed a toolkit for writing code as literature. How? > GIST was designed for just this purpose. GIST uses the same principals (*sic*) as GIT, but is designed to be code that is read, rather than compiled. A Gist is a Git repository. Like Github's main use of Git it's an enclosure and a Facebookization, in this case of the pastebin market. pastebin.com for example dates back to 2002 and was not dedicated to code. Code sharing communities date back to the dawn of computing and their suppression by enclosure, by "Intellectual Property" law, is what gave rise to Free Software in the first place. Sharing non-executable code is weaker than sharing executable code. Complaints about incomplete and non-running code provided in questions on StackOverflow are about community and value. > I was surprised it did not come up in the initial discussion, and wanted to mention it here. > > A step from GIST to Literature is not hard to see, especially among dilettante and savant programmers, passing messages/documents around, working without warrant or language, double especially for the ones If code as literature is simply "code with funny variable names that probably doesn't run" then that is disappointing. If it's "code as the shared communication of a community" then this long predates GitHub's enclosure. But that doesn't explain how it's literature. If we take a more abstract view of literature as a written means of promulgating worldviews and values and of building community and of resolving contradictions in ideology then code can be that. But literature is not unique in its capacity for that, and it's not clear why we should call code that performs these functions literature rather than law (cf. Lessig) or religion (cf. Jobs). > called "artists". The realz question is why these coppers be bangin' on our Lit yo. Its gots to be about power 'cause if iran-contra was theater, then wtf. its Eitha' 'bout weapons or influence dog && my moneyz on influence. It's a matter of ego. Hackers are often ignorant of the problem domain of literature and litterateurs are often ignorant of the problem domain of hacking. It's easy to make code that looks superficially like literature or literature that looks superficially like code and to seek their perceived higher status in a particular social domain. What's much harder is to find a synthesis of the affordances and demands of the two that actually does useful work in either problem domain. There's More Than One Way To Do It, and people do do it, but it's not easy, and it's certainly not a product of corporate enclosure of time or community. - Rob. _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
