Hey yall,
I am not online as often as you, so apologies in advance for not being more
timely.
Cucumber (http://cukes.info) is definitely my favorite code to read. Jasmine
(https://github.com/pivotal/jasmine) can sometimes be a 'close second',
despite the overbearing assertions and 'be' verbs. It all depends on the
author.
Behavour-driven-development may be just another blip on the
natural-language-code timeline, but then again, it may not.
I echo the many thanks going around for references, dialogue and
perceptiveness by all involved. There are two threads that I would like to
tease out a bit, as I felt they got sidelined along the way.
[1] Late modernist literature as it relates to code wurk. Rob's defense of
an instinctual off-hand comment. Some wit from me.
[2] Jimmy Wales daughter. Alan's rejection of Lists in general.
Wiki-literature and collaborative writing.
Let me know your ideas!
Bz
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> <I loathe "Infinite Jest" > do you? it always rather a shock
when
> *someone* one respects & admires hates *something* one loves.
I do. I know I'm in a miniscule minority here. I have read the whole
book, read reviews and discussions of it, and read about its genesis
and
production but this is a largely visceral reaction that I'm not
particularly proud of. It wasn't germane to the discussion so I really
shouldn't have mentioned it. I'm sorry.
[1] Late modernist literature as it relates to code wurk. Rob's defense and
dismissal of an instinctual and off-hand comment. Some wit from me.
Of course we all must respect the brilliance set down in word by giants of
contemporary literature like David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon. Many
followed in their tradition, and I have spent much of my waking life
marveling over their foldings of language.
Yet, after reading more Marx, Foucault, Lacan, I came to believe that this
genre called "post-modern literature" missed some very fundamental mark.
Their hearts were in the right place, but when the future story of past
thought is told, I felt these authors would be found in the narrative of our
era's growing, extreme, and almost baroque excesses. That in-fact Wallace
was an example of well-crafted late-Modernism, and not what comes next.
That said, I think it is exactly this breakdown-in-transition IN Literature,
or at least in popular academic literary analysis, that prevents Alan and
Rob's critique to spread/permeate into places like Yale.
I'll give one example of why I think this. Save for very few practices an
author rarely concedes crafting the social affect of their literature, nor
do most academics publicly study the social function of literature as
part-in-parcel with linguistic accomplishments. Not that the two fields
don't sometimes overlap, but the idea of Einstein's Proofs being an example
of code that is worthy of literary analysis, falls so completely flat to
someone that has never considered the physical universe as a prosthetic of
language.
Most bookworms gots distracted by the bindings; forgots that the words have
the powers, because the words have the peoples. Maybe Lot 49 was crying
because it forgot its point, or its peoples? I always felt like Pynchon was
leading me on a wild goose chase toward red herrings, but then there would
be these plateaus of sense-making, all too inconceivably arranged.
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Or another ugly way of putting it, I hate lists, however defined
(again) - on a personal level because someone or some group is
always excluded, and since I'm more often than not in that
group, I see them, themselves, as hegemonic in function,
although not in intention.
[2] Jimmy Wales daughter. Alan's rejection of Lists in general.
Wiki-literature and collaborative writing.
I played legos with Jimmy Wales' daughter one time. I showed up to some
random Hackathon in an attic of an old office building and there was a
five-year-old playing in the corner. So I helped babysit, since there seemed
to be a lack. Only to find out that the father, inventor of Wikipedia, had
been mobbed and absconded in the green room, prior to his presentation to
twenty or less completely unprepared "bar-camp"
participant+volunteer+organizers. Childcare was not the only thing they had
failed to provide, but the event is not the important part.
Along the way, Jimmy uttered this amazingly concise statement on network
technology; he said that wiki was the only technology that brought people
together in agreement. Forums and mailing lists like this, have
statistically demonstrable problems with sustainable agreement. Usually the
loudest and most extreme voices push out the meager marginal voices,
approaching both hegemony and harmony, and eventually banality as a room
full of bullies agreeing with e'chotha'.
Don't get me wrong; I love this list and I think Alan does too. None the
less, Lists in general, have issues. My critique is that if, if the source
code of both a forum and a wiki were fun to read, it would be the wiki that
best responds to literary analysis. I believe there must be some
'functional' requirement that cannot be explained computationally,
mathematically or linguistically. In this way, a wiki is more functional
than a forum or mailing list, and thus its source more literary.
Now, the word "function" has 15 different meanings in these contexts, so let
me be specific. I am using "function" as a User Experience designer would,
to mean the eventual social affect of the work. I am not talking about
"functional mathematics" and I definitely am attempting to discredit "code
quality". If we consider software as literature, one could write the most
efficient program ever, but if it does not change someone's life or show
them something special, then it has failed as literature. Imo, code as
literature has even more qualifications: achievement in linguistics,
readability, computational artistry, mathematical relevance and functional
evocativeness.
But even this 'functional' becomes its own little rabbit hole (read:
problematic). Wikis are a collaborative writing engine, so to measure the
social ramifications of this technology, we would have to compare all of the
literature that the technology begot. Additionally, the source code, Media
Wiki, has it's own lineage of forks, each of them enabling reams of
derivative, affected works, ripe for analysis. Mathematically, some Media
Wiki forks do super advanced shiznit with "distributed" updates and their
"eventual synchrony" though this comes more from cloud computing than wiki
technology. The Media Wiki source code is pretty well commented, but of
course it could be more poetic if somebody had half-a-mind to write it that
way.
Even then, Authorship takes a nose dive into oblivion (read: existentialism)
say when you consider wiki-fan-fiction to be a derivative work relevant to
the reading of the source. Collaborative Writing then bares it's ugly head,
and the whole situation starts to feel like families of fungi popping
up, disparate yet globally connected through a vast underground (read:
imperceptible) root system (read: diaspora).
Then what do we have? A big ball full of yarn? notin' but electrons and
economics I guess.
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