So long as my the above thesis - roughly all programming is driven by literary theory - is true so that I can still try to write code. As much as I enjoy writing for humans, I enjoy writing for computers too.
After I wrote that, I wondered how alluring is literary theory among computer scientists:
Knuth -> Literate Programming
Abelson & Sussman -> Programs must be written for people to read
Guido van Rossum -> The Python Way
Literary theory is a siren. The web offers the potential for a vast salon. Programming is steeped in aesthetics.
I actually almost went and got an English master's after my CS undergrad. I've found that there are more people from the humanities who are interested in code than there are coders interested in the humanities, though there are a number of us :)
Hi Steve, want your take on Tara McPherson's thesis on sexism and racism in computing is rooted int the modularity ("separate but equal") of UNIX Kernel design.
My take:
I found the paper highly interesting and would like your take on it since it's relevant to what you're talking about. My take is her sourcing of Eric S. Raymond and his writings to be really interesting. ESR comes off as an anti-authoritarian (hackers glider, special) and also very tribalist (open source, GNU). On one hand, the presumption of meritocracy as an given in IT is really highlighted in ESR's manifesto's; on the other hand, he really belongs to a subset of "old school" hackers with Steve Levy, Richard Stallman.
I'd be highly interested for a socio-literary critical analysis of code and blog posts by DHH, PG and patio11 to construct the attitudes of the "Entrepreneur/Ruby" generation and whether the debate/adoption of new frameworks/languages/paradigms (Go, Ember.js, Rust, Responsive Design) is a new form of elitism and/or marketing for software developers as a consumer class. Also the shift from centralized servers (Sun SPARCs/Windows NT) to a more distributed programming model (Node.js, Celery, RabbitMQ, Hadoop) mirror the fragmentary nature, autonomous organizing of modern living (contract vs. full-time tenured employment, delayed marriages, millenials' definition of hooking up and founders dating).
I was actually physically in attendance when McPhereson presented this paper, long ago. Well, at least, she presented it at my university, I don't think it was the first time she revealed it or anything. I also own a copy of this book somewhere...
My take at the time was that McPherson wasn't making a causal or even correlative claim: just showing that this similar social structure appeared at the same time in two completely distinct situations. Nothing more than that. Which ends up being _interesting_, but not something that you can directly _use_ in any day-to-day way. That said, I do think the 'modular form' makes a lot of sense, and it has impacted some of my thinking. For a recent variant of this, you may enjoy Galloway's criticism of the OOO people. He draws a sort of similar conceptual schema with regards to {Ford,Taylor}ism's modularity and OOP, as well as the anti-humanism of OOO.
Then again, re-reading just now:
> In short, I suggest that these two moments are deeply interdependent.
Sooooo maybe that assessment was off. I'll have to give this another read. I guess I'm currently in agreement with your 'summary' link.
> My take is her sourcing of Eric S. Raymond and his writings to be really interesting.
Yeah. I mean, it's the logical place to go. And if you want to talk about the intersection of programming and race, well, esr is one of the more embarrassing sources you can pull up. She didn't touch on any of that, though, which I was pretty surprised about.
> I'd be highly interested for a socio-literary critical analysis of code
I'll take only the first half of this sentence to plug my own project: set up an email reminder to check out http://metaphysics.io, which I recently purchased for this express purpose. I'm still working out exactly what the project is, but I have four initial essays that I've drafted up so far. I think I'm going to release them as "issues", rather than one at a time like blog posts. Three of them are explicitly computer science related and one is not. The first issue deals mostly with affect theory, because I've been enamored with it lately.
You may want to check out what Kevin Brock has been doing lately around the intersection of rhetoric and code. There are other people who touch on this from time to time too, one of the most recent: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/blog/2014/tdd-straw-men-a...
> whether the debate/adoption of new frameworks/languages/paradigms (Go, Ember.js, Rust, Responsive Design) is a new form of elitism and/or marketing for software developers as a consumer class.
This idea is super interesting. I want to describe it as much more... cynical than what I think, but it may in fact be true.
> Also the shift from centralized servers to a more distributed programming model mirror the fragmentary nature, autonomous organizing of modern living
I will most certainly be writing some thoughts about this in the future. I almost can see a parallel to McPhereson: two modes of organization, springing up in the same time and place.
I've booked metaphysics.io and read the TDD/rhetoric article.
I see his pt. regarding people using "lores" like (ESR's writing or 37signals) to promote their ideas. The funny thing is had I encountered this article randomly on HN, I'd have not registered the whole "lore"-bit and skipped right to the milli-second benchmarks the author presented and the code snippets. But the truth is, by using the whole lore, the author has already primed me to think that the TDD mocking practice is somewhat flawed; the code snippets themselves just become the window dressing. But I'd have came away satisfied with myself looking at the numbers "objectively".
I found it highly interesting that the book was published at the dawn of Facebook (April 2004) where Galloway focused on the gov't and commercial cabal (Oracle, Sun, Microsoft, Cisco, Network Solutions) on driving networking protocol standards, Java standards and RFC comittee's. Using Foccault's panopticon as the device, he painted almost an "1984"-like dystopia. Of course, in 2014 where we have BuzzFeed, Facebook, Instagram, Snapshot combined with NSA and Edward Snowden, but also a MSFT led by an Indian guy who wants run .net ecosystem like Apache, I'm not sure whether we are living in an Stallman-Communist state, NSA-Authoritarian state or Soma-Facebook-Brave New World state.
What's more interesting to me however is a programmer's role in all of this. Steve Levy's "Hacker," "2600" and cyberpunk seems to be far away in today's HBO's "Silicon Valley" and accelerator culture, just like the 80's. I'm hoping that grunge will happen in response to the Sex Pistols though.
The advantage coders have is that they have an easier time finding paid employment writing. So if nothing else, they tend to be better typists a few years after graduation...and perhaps more attentive to punctuation.
They learn to code meme is running rampant. But it's going to be hard for former humanities majors to make the jump. They tend not to have the math background and so long as programming is treated as engineering or science, that will be a barrier to entry.
I haven't found it to be that big of a deal, and I've spent lots of years teaching people. It's true that some background in discrete math/logic is incredibly helpful, but I think it's pretty rare for a math background to be needed for non-theoretical computer science.
I'm actually teaching a programming workshop at this year's Cultural Studies Association, so we'll see. :)
No other domain allows such concise examples for illustrating concepts. And no other domain locks so many people rigid with fear.. Merely introducing numbers can evoke memories of failure experienced as a tween. As a form of illiteracy it separates the afflicted from The field's important navigational landmarks, from useful abstractions and limits what can be communicated to the peculiar portion of the audience.
I guess my literary theory is rooted in the idea of a classical cannon. There's forever to learn more maths, but learn more a programmer must to communicate ever more clearly.
Not having a strong math background is a substantial disadvantage to learning computer science, but practical programming isn't computer science, and there's quite a lot of material available aimed at teaching programming that doesn't assume a strong math background and doesn't try to teach CS as such.
