Why Scholars and Programmers Need to Talk
By Ersin Akinci
Scholars and programmers are two groups that know hardly anything about each other, and yet the world needs them to come together, quickly. Nothing less than the future of art and the existence of literature hangs in the balance, which I’ve tried to make clear to fellow programmers in the past. Today, I want to address fellow scholars and give five critical reasons why the other side needs us and why we need them.
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UPDATE: One of my readers pointed out that the term “scholar” is ambiguous. For this article, I’ve used scholar to refer to humanities scholars in general.
Talking with programmers
I had written an article a while ago on OSNews (“The Death of the Computeral Craftsman”, 4/7/2010) lamenting the disappearance of a certain kind of aesthetic impulse in computers that I called “computeral craftsmanship”. My fatal flaw was to explain this term on the second page:
Those who write in raw static HTML, on the other hand, can manipulate formatting to say what they mean with much greater control…I could replicate the same effects on my WordPress blog by editing the theme and its CSS, but it would be a separate act from writing the content and not a representation of my thoughts and emotions during the moment of creating the web page. This is the reason why an old Geocities page used to look so hideous, because its formatting was the impulsive expression ofthe author in situ; that is the kind of unity, between content and format through a continuous moment of expression, that Web has lost.
Clearly, almost no one got that far since I was instantly barraged by OSNews readers who, not understanding what I meant by “craftsmanship”, were furious that I would dare insult their career paths and honor by claiming that programmers are not “craftsmen” (i.e., people who do a good job and take pride in their work). I particularly enjoyed comments to the effect of “clearly you have never done any professional programming” (I have), “I stopped reading after this: ______” (then why did you bother in the first place?), or “Actually, the first X wasn’t Y but rather Z, you should know this before you decide to write an article” (this is the sort of pedantry that often makes grade school miserable).
One reaction might be to dismiss OSNews’s audience with a stereotype, as anti-English majors completely incapable of understanding a thesis, which is indeed the exact attitude that one of my friends who works as a system administrator had. Yet if anything, the fact that almost no one had gotten through to the end underscores the case that I’ve made on this blog, that we need to move past the page metaphor and discover authentically computeral methods of communication.
Beyond hermeneutics, however, there is a greater lesson: scholars and programmers both have a long way to go before they can start talking to each other on the same level. My real purpose in writing that article was to start a conversation between these two sides by telling the engineers, “Hey, we need to start thinking less about gigaflops and more about Gilgamesh”, and the reaction was highly negative at first. After I hashed out the meaning of some of my main points in the comments section, however, I began several positive and constructive discussions with my readers about everything from their emotions while programming to connections between Model-View-Controller-based applications and the dissemination of knowledge in the medieval West through the church. The problem was that it took much effort to get to the point where we had enough of a mutual understanding to communicate.
Five points for scholars
So then why not start with the scholars? Because as reactionary as programmers might be, humanities scholars are woefully unprepared for twenty first-century technology. It’s difficult to relate Model-View-Controller schemas to someone who doesn’t understand database administration; put another way, while it’s difficult to explain why Canterbury Tales is great literature to someone who spends all day reading COBOL, it’s impossible to show why C++ is not art to someone who only knows Chaucer.
The truth is that both sides need to come closer to each other, and they need to do it quickly. I’ve tried to make this clear to fellow programmers in the past, and today I want to address fellow scholars and give five critical reasons why the other side needs us and why we need them:
- Computers are replacing literature. The fundamental premise of this blog, which I’ve harped on ad nauseum and which I’ll repeat here yet again, has been that the time that people used to spend reading books is now spent in front of computers, but that artistically, emotionally, and spiritually, computers lack something that books have. That something has been at the core of Western civilization for hundreds of years, and we can already begin to feel the ill effects as it withers away: social alienation, a sense of emptiness, and above all loneliness. The answer isn’t to back pedal into rotogravures and Gainsboroughian oil landscapes, but rather to take what we know about the magic of art and breath life into the new media, which demands people who still study art. Otherwise, we can watch YouTube take over film and pretend that Twitter novels can replace the real thing.
- Paper is a dead letter. Paper will never disappear, just as Socrates’s prediction that writing would completely supplant memory never came to pass, but like Socrates we are making the same fundamental error in assuming that new technology is 100% a natural extension from the old way of doing things. For the stonemason, this meant that writing was a dangerous pharmakon to be treated with suspicion, whereas for us we think that we can pay lip service to computers by “digitizing texts” or using “online learning platforms”, thus establishing our credentials as progressive technocrats. We need to do more, for our own sake. The future of humanity will be written in light, literally, so if we don’t learn assembly programming or how TTL logic circuits work or at the very least Logo, then the very source material that defines our function, way of life, and careers will be totally alien. Historians in fifty years who don’t understand memory management will be like chronologists before philology or archaeology, and Alexander von Humboldt will have to make room for Isidore of Seville.
- We need more than just the imperative mood. There is a critical problem with computers that no one has pointed out yet, which is that every programming “language” is nothing more than a set of instructions. In other words, the languages we are immersing ourselves in are completely in the imperative mood; there is no indicative or subjunctive, nor is there optative, jussive, potential, or room for any other modality. How can there be art or literature when everything is a command? Case in point, one of the most popular tools for creating software today, Microsoft Visual Studio, calls each program a “solution“. A solution to what, the soul’s troubles? Another example, a lot of people claim that video games are a new form of art, an argument that Roger Ebert thrashed eloquently since art is not “winnable”. Yes, we might “play” with the text, but when have you ever gone into a museum and said “Booya, Rembrandt! Take that, Picasso! I always knew you were a punk!”? If there’s anything that scholars are good for, it’s to make a straightforward issue seem so complicated that even the question slips away, which is the essence of our Sisyphus-like existence, only scholars bring it to a textual level where we can all enjoy humanity’s fist fight with itself. Computing needs that kind of thinking if we’re going to cross the boundary into artistic expression.
- We’re the only ones left who can read 300 pages at a time. After you run for three miles and hit the runner’s high, the world becomes a completely different place than what you had known before, just as a book read at 30 pages/hour will inevitably be different than the same book read at 80 pages/hour though the pages remain the same. Similarly, the fragmentation of content due to digital technology has changed our perception of that content so much that it’s effectively changed the content itself. (For one thing, we’ve begun referring to it as “content”, as if we were trading pork belly futures.) Maybe that’s not a bad thing (doubtful), but there’s no way to compare the two unless we have people who understand both ways of thinking, fragmented and continuous, both clicking pixels and turning pages–and I don’t mean Clive Cussler.
- Untold worlds already await. In case you think that everything I’ve proposed is for some Grossforschung project of the future, I want to point out that incredible stories and worlds are unfolding online right now despite the Internet’s pallor. I’ve already discussed an incredible epistolary mini-”novel” between two branches of a powerful Syrian family unwittingly written in the backpages of Wikipedia. There are examples, like the Neen movement, which have achieved some success creating moving new art based on computers (Miltos Manetas, a Neen leader, has even had some works exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery), albeit perhaps not completely computeral in the sense that I’ve talked about. I read a thread at the PostSecret Community forums just yesterday where members decided to try sum up as much empirically-learned wisdom as they could (in case you are unfamiliar with PostSecret, click here). Yes, they lacked the method of Aristotle and the set up of Richard Ford a la The Sportswriter, but the seed is the same kernel that sprouted speculative Greek philosophy. Scholars can and should start talking about these things.
Nothing less than the future of art and the existence of literature hangs in the balance.
The Why Scholars and Programmers Need to Talk by Ersin Akinci, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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What a great and seminal article. I could not follow all the insider references since I’m neither a programmer nor a scholar. But these lines made laugh out aloud hah hah haaa!!!
“How can there be art or literature when everything is a command?”
and
“(For one thing, we’ve begun referring to it as “content”, as if we were trading pork belly futures.)”
Very well put and so funny. Seems like you’ve got a tiger by the tail here. I’ll follow your future posts with great interest to see where this line of inquiry will lead to and if both the programmers and scholars will get your drift. I hope they will because this “alienation” business is very real and has to be tackled head on by both sides by learning more about each other’s craft and assumptions.
For your consideration, re: 3.:
Declarative programming is not imperative.
Just a few observations …
The cultural motivations and assimilations would help a lot of readers to “contextualise” your posts ?
Please define your “cultural” boundaries ? Anglo Saxon – germanic – gaelic .. ? What do you mean by “scholar” ?
And what exactly do you mean by “programmer” ? – by Job, training,education, motivation or someone who looks and understands the “world” in an “information systems centric ” manner.
pRogramming is just another R – ( the 3R’s + 1).
A “scholar” is someone probably an expert in a few specific areas.
A programmer is a “creator” / “designer” by definition. Creation of real / abstract models of systems which grapple with solving “real” problems. If the “problem” requires him to be an expert in a specific area, he becomes one.
Very “few” scholars create in the sense of the programmer ( other than those in the sciences and engineering ). I would not consider “art” as creation , it is just an expression – external manifestation of culturally influenced composites of internal mental states. People with shared mental states and cultures can appreciate art. It is a “shared” experience , and mostly interpretive.
Programmers can be — rather will become scholars — in the due course of time – assuming they plan a career – which is rich in the variety of problems they are exposed to.
A scholar – one who has set out to be one – in the “classical” humanities sense – probably will never understand the programmer.
It is upto the “programmer” and people of similar ilk – with their generally higher motivational and “abstraction” abilities – to understand the “scholar”.
The 3rd culture comprising of “mostly” science and programmer types have already begun the “conversation”, in a way.
http://edge.org/documents/ThirdCulture/f-Introduction.html
So much for my comments. Apologies , if the comments cause any
offence ( mild or otherwise) .
Thank you
Hi Daniel, thanks for the link. I’ve heard of Scheme, OCaml, etc., but I had never heard of the declarative programming paradigm. It’s interesting that Wikipedia describes it as opposed to the imperative mood because from what I can tell so far it looks like declarative programming is really just imperative mood with the passive voice. In the end, you’re still using a bunch of let-like statements to tell the computer what to do. There’s nothing for computers like writing “The girl walks the dog”. Even the physical act of having “The girl walks the dog” displayed on screen requires an elaborate chain of commands that eventually translate into the computer displaying that sentence at 60+ Hz. Nothing like writing “The boys run” with ink on paper, letting it dry, feeling it, rubbing it, staring at it, and rereading it a month later. That feels radically different for me, and I suspect for most others as well though it might be less pronounced or more subconscious.
Interesting article.
Funny enough, I visited the Guggenheim Museum for the first time recently and thought to myself: “I cannot imagine anyone trying to do this kind of art (paintings, collages, photography) a hundred years from now; these really aren’t much different from dozens of Facebook posts I see every day.” And the themes of many of the works are to put in bluntly no more sophisticated than those explored on various prime time soap operas on “The WB” or “The CW” networks: alienation, sex, rights of passage, etc.
I’m not sure what you’re asking for is really in the domain of programmers. Programming is the language of computers only in the same way that math is the language of physics. We do not need to know math at a deep level to create art; similarly, we do not need to know programming at a deep level to operate an application like Photoshop, GIMP, or Inkscape.
With respect to art or writing, programming seems more like the making of the artist’s tools rather than the creation of the art itself. Programming is its own art too, but no one expects an industrial design — no matter how elegantly it solves its problem — to have artistic meaning to the general public.
Hi there, thanks for your insights and for the link. I didn’t take any offense at all, and I agree with a couple of your points, especially when you pointed out that programmers are creators, which should be distinguished from scholars whose main job is to study creation (although the study of creation is itself a creation, and the programmer’s creation cannot come about without study, so the two exist in a cycle). That’s why I have so much hope for programmers and engineers, because they are in line with poets and painters more than philosophers and historians are. I’m speaking in very broad generalizations here, and of course there are many, many exceptions, myself included if you were to count me as anything.
I respectfully disagree with you about art, however. Art is creation, and I’m not sure how you are distinguishing creation from expression. I also don’t see art as just the mechanical result of certain mental processes, or rather I don’t necessarily disagree with you that that’s how art comes about, but for me it misses the main point. Art has its own power, as if it were a force or an animal, and for a very long time scholars starting at least with Catholic theologians but perhaps earlier have known that it is impossible to completely describe creation. (This same insight is at the root of modern science, which seeks to describe not natural phenomena but rather the conditions under which those phenomena occur.) Hence, the essence of art isn’t even in its expression in a medium necessarily, though we access art’s power through the medium. Also, even though we always need the medium, the sovereign power of art is such that sometimes we can create art without manipulating the medium: like when we read a book, since the reading itself is a creative act.
Culture informs the artist and influences the expression, yes, but that doesn’t mean that the art itself is tied only to the context it was created in. That’s why we’re forced in grade school to read boring Shakespeare, which all of a sudden isn’t so boring once the light switches on in our heads and we “get” Shakespeare’s context. So I agree that context is social and art is social, but through education we can adopt many different contexts and feel art’s power.
As for “scholar”, for the purposes of this article I meant “humanities scholar”, e.g. historians, linguists, literary critics. The “old” intellectual class that the author referred to in the link that you sent.
Speaking of which, I disagree with Brockman on a number of points. It’s worth noting first that he makes a lot of assertions about academics without giving any specific proof, but as a generalization I’m willing to concede that scientists seem to be more keen on the humanities side of things than humanities scholars are on the scientific, much less still anything having to do with engineering or technology. There’s also a lot of room for improvement in the academy, but Brockman is greatly oversimplifying matters to fit the typical US Culture Wars paradigm of the 90′s. The history of science is long and each discipline rises and falls on the backs of different methods; moreover, he doesn’t do justice to the complex interplay of how all fields of knowledge have molded and shaped each other and continue to do so. Many scholars have written about this kind of thing, and as far as I can tell most of them are from the “humanities side”. Scientists tend to have a more rigid and mechanical view of the world and they’re usually brimming with a healthy confidence that they can eventually explain every detail. Unfortunately, their methods haven’t proven fruitful when it comes to knowing ourselves.
A simple empirical test is to sit down for an hour and ask yourself who you are. Follow whichever method you like, neither humanists nor scientists have got it. In fact, neither will ever get it, because we are being itself and science and scholarship can never recreate being, only study its conditions. The genius of modern science is that it has made this insight into doctrine, but that won’t help us understand what it means to be.
You couldn’t be more right, Kevin, about programming being a tool, because ultimately the computer is a tool. The problem is that it’s also taking on the role of art, and in fact this is a problem that I’m researching right now that we see recurring with every new information technology. When writing first appeared on the scene, some of the first scratches that we know of were commercial transactions, laws, etc. In other words, writing was a tool for maintaining trade and order. Then literature emerged. At first, it was just transcriptions of songs and other oral traditions (e.g., the Odyssey, Plato’s dialogues, Aristotle’s “lecture notes”), and for a long time writing was intrinsically linked to reading aloud and speaking. It wasn’t until the Renaissance that we started to develop the habit of reading quietly to ourselves, and it wasn’t until Cervantes that we had the novel. Pick up a novel today and try to read it aloud: it’s pure nonsense, no one talks like that. Yet that novel is art, and it is intrinsically linked to nature of the book.
For computers, I see ourselves at the beginning of this historical arc. We’re using them as tools (btw, thank you for making the distinction between art and tools for creating art, I couldn’t agree with you more and it’s hard to explain that sometimes), yet we see some glimmers of an alternative art form that can only be realized through a computer and that we have not even imagined yet. As much as video games fail to be art, for instance, it’s undeniable that there’s something about them that hints at it. You hear snippets from time to time, like Matt Mullenweg at a recent conference who claimed that WordPress is interactive art, which is a ridiculous claim but one nevertheless can understand the sentiment. Even browsing the web, we feel a little of that something that stirs within as when we listen to music. But is it enough to die for? To cut off one’s ear for? No…not yet. I think that right now we are still constrained by thinking of everything in terms of preceding paradigms (web pages, virtual reality) and that’s what I’ve been trying to break out of.
Ersin:
I think I see what you’re saying. Thanks for taking the time to respond.
You may be interested in languages like Prolog, where the line between statement and command is more blurred. The program is a series of facts stated to the computer, followed by a series of questions that the computer answers as best it can. A program may not even have questions at the end, in which case the computer’s reading produces no action.
We interpret a Prolog statement like “walked_the_dog(girl)” as a command, “add walked_the_dog(girl) to your database”, only in the context of a reader, the computer, who we know will read the statement that way. A human is a more nuanced reader and will interpret “the girl walked the dog” in any number of ways, but the statement is still made for effect: so the reader will understand the story, or to communicate a mood, or to comment on the modern female condition
Maybe what you really want are more flexible readers– computers that do something with a program other than run it. For example, I might want the computer to read a Prolog program and tell me how fast it would run, or whether it mentions girls or dogs, or check online to see if the author is reputable. According to the Curry-Howard corresponence, every program specifies a mathematical proof; maybe you’d want a computer reader to extract the proof, or to process the proof and find other branches of mathematics it could be used for.
Ahh, ink and paper
I do wish I could pull down a tome from the shelves, blow the dust off the cover, and open it to read the Code of the Ancient Computer Grandmasters, no longer runnable because their compilers have been lost to the ages. Not enough history yet…
Hi Ersin ,
Continuing the discussion ,
From the “general” drift of the argument- i hope i can assume the following :: The cultural basis for the arguments put forth are “euro-centric”
some observations:
1. What is considered “art” in the euro-centric ( anglophone + germanic descent ) world is probably gobbledygook to 4.5 billion + of humans.
2. This can be “brushed” off as “their” ignorance.
3. The “force” of art that is referred to – is qualitatively measured by what really it “inspires” ? What was one
result of the “renaissance” – an unleashing of “we are superior because we create art” ideologies – historically speaking ( probably continues to this day nascently )? – Colonialism and cultural imperialism and destruction of Native cultures for one.
There can be no “universal” definition of art , because if “we” define it in english , it simply cannot define “all human art” , by definition.
Programming is probably a “modern” creative tool / form of expression without all this baggage.A Japanese programmer’s “creations” might be very different from a “euro-centric” programmer. No baggage here.
Programming is “creation with a purpose” – to solve problems (mostly other people’s). Art is not. Art is personal. Nobody creates art for another person’s consumption.It is also created to “elicit and attract” appreciation – another primitive selfish motive. So a fundamental “primitive selfish motive” is present in art. Being “selfish” is a good thing so “art” is a good thing ( a fundamental assumption of the economic sciences by the way ) – is not a sellable argument.
it is also present in programming to a certain degree ( but restricted to the clique of programmers ) – The entire driving force of the “open source” movement is creating tools for each other. You will hardly find open source tools for “specialised” domains , which the programmer generally has no clue about – simply because he does not need it , not because of any inherent complexity or unknowability in the domain.
As to “studying” of creation – well .. everyone needs to study it. whatever it (creation) might mean. There is no cycle per se here,
they exist as a pair ( study practice ).
Everything including what we now call “science, engineering and tech” was natural philosophy just 150 years ago – so why this classification of humanities vs non-humanities especially when we talk of creating super-arching metaphors for discussing larger issues. One has to become an expert in both to begin to bridge them ( possibly a lifetime spent with purpose).
As to the “declarative vs imperative” argument : it is very artificial ( syntactic sugar in progarmming language jargon). Both are interchangeable , if you use the proper construct to express them in the first place , that is.
http://library.readscheme.org/page1.html – papers 2 and 3 – circa 1976
The “humanities” by definition study the human condition ( euro-centric though it maybe ). So the responsibilty of “figuring” out the trajectory of human development and progress/regress ( the quality of his condition) solely “lies” with this class of scholars ( no doubting this ).
Scientists only “hope” to explain everything ; they infact are “most incomplete” when it comes to “explaining” in the “real” sense ,
in fact thay cannot explain even 1 entity in its entirety. Science and research is driven by its application to human betterment ( whatever that means ). We do not even know the fundamental constituents of matter. What we have are incomplete incoherent theories , with which we make do and using which we manipulate enough of the world around us to serve or “short” term purposes.
As to the “empirical test” of asking yourself who you are – It should be a lifelong vocation – not just for one hour. But an hour is “good” start.
http://netfuture.org/fdnc/appa.html – is probably a great place to “look” for arguments – as programmers create by using language ( mankind’s highest representational tool) fundamentally , a bit constrained by the computer’s need for rigor though it maybe , the “path to a higher consciousness is most possibly through “language”.
Thank you
Hi Daniel,
I just checked out Prolog and it looks fascinating. I’m have to study this carefully now, thanks for sending it along!
You’re absolutely right when it comes to the question of flexible readers. I’ve heard of the Curry-Howard correspondence in general terms before, and learning what it actually means is going to be a daunting challenge for me, one that I look forward to =)!
I’ll say this, though. At the fundamental hardware level, the fact that computers are based on electrical gates seems to be a great stumbling block for me. The imperative mood starts with the transistor’s control lead, for which I see two alternatives to come closer to artistic expression. Either we can change the way we perceive the computer’s actions (flexible human readers) or we can get replace gate networks with something completely different (well…maybe not necessarily “flexible” computer readers, but at least something different than what we have now). The first option came to me when I thought about certain natural phenomena, like waterfalls, that are beautiful simply by conforming to the laws of physics. A computer, too, could be like a waterfall, but the critical difference is that a waterfall’s input is nature whereas the computer’s is a human, which still keeps it in the realm of tools. Moreover, as beautiful as they are, waterfalls aren’t art unless maybe one is religious and/or personifies a god who made the waterfall, in which case perhaps you would feel something akin to the power of art (I mean this seriously, but I have no way to test for it).
The second option, on the other hand, would probably mean making machines that aren’t technically computers. This is why I’ve coined the phrase “computeral”, because there is a certain something about computers that we all recognize and accept today that makes them unique, and it’s not really a technical definition. My aim is to stay true to that sense and elevate and explore it; it’s an emotional and mental state, not a proof or a spec. I’m planning on writing up an explanation later today about what one such “computer” might look like, so stay tuned!
tns:
I’m not sure how Eurocentricism ties into the discussion. Taking your three points,
1) If what is considered art is by definition Eurocentric, then I don’t agree with your definition of art. In fact, I could never agree with any definition of art because, as I wrote below, I don’t think art can be defined. I gave a link to another post regarding Thomas Aquinas and his search for the definition of God as an example of why being escapes definition. To say that Western art or Japanese art or any other kind of art is gobbledygook to others outside of their groups is a bit of a non-statement. Most art is gobbledygook to most people, period! But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the art itself is “bad” or “worthless”, and as I pointed out, education goes a long way to open up the corridors so that we can appreciate and feel the power of art that is beyond us. Not that education is the only way. Someone in my family, for instance, was telling me that Jackson Pollock eluded him until he hit age 40, at which point all of a sudden he “got it”, and Pollock from that day forward became one of his favorite artists. Until then, it was all gobbledygook–yet Pollock’s paintings didn’t change. It was the viewer who changed, and then the power of the painting, which was always there regardless of the viewer, was unlocked.
2) I’m not sure what you mean by brushing off as ignorance. Personally, I would never be so arrogant as to brush off anyone who’s trying to understand art (at least, not consciously), and ignorance of other peoples’ art is something to take very seriously (not to be “brushed off”). We are all full of ignorance, not just non-Westerners.
3) I would avoid trying to establish a metric for what art is. Not only is it futile to define or thus measure, but it’s not necessary. I’m appealing here to an understanding of art based on its effects. The only “universal” assertion that I’ve made is that a great many people recognize art and are moved by it (I would also avoid the word “inspired”) regardless of what they think art is.
Regarding the Japanese programmer, again, I’m not sure how valid tying in Eurocentricism is. At least, I’ve never heard of cultural biases affecting one’s coding. If they did, I would think that international open source or research projects would be very difficult to maintain.
You’ve set up a bit of a straw man with art being selfish. I’m not sure what you meant to say with that paragraph. Were you trying to demonstrate that art is not a “good thing”? I never made that claim. I also didn’t follow the paragraph that came after.
You’re spot on with noting that these divisions between the humanities and the sciences are recent. I don’t think that they’re arbitrary, however, and modern science is distinguished by its methods from natural philosophy. The difference in methods is certainly older than 150 years, but etymologically one should note that it wasn’t until 1833 that “scientist” was even coined by Whewell in a debate with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (yes, the poet) at the Royal Society. You’re right to note that bridging them would be a lifelong task, and many have tried but failed! But that’s neither here nor there. I would also not lump “engineering and technology” with “science” as many in the humanities unfortunately do, since they are fundamentally different things.
I was being very tongue in cheek with my hour long test. The point is that you would fail because we don’t have a sure way of saying who we are. I’m not even advocating that we should or that we can, my only point is that the methods used in the sciences have not demonstrated that they can lead us there, which is one reason why some humanities scholars may be skeptical about the promise of modern science. Asking the question, “Who am I?”, absolutely should be a lifelong vocation, the keyword being “vocation”, since it’s not really a goal to be conquered and then set aside. (Indeed, some religions claim that not even one lifetime is enough.)
Hi Ersin:
Some clarifications are in order ..
Why “Euro-centric” ?
1.”Humanities” studies western civilization-centric human behaviours.
2. Nobody possibly studies “humanities” in traditional knowledge systems in china/japan/india/iran.I personally know of the “curricula” in india and japan.
3. Humanities is by definition since inception “Euro-centric” – deals with human issues from the perspective of western civilization.There is no denying this.
4. Incidentally,we are holding this discussion in “English” ? possibly a “weak” argument — since it is understood globally – but nevertheless is an argument.
When dealing with science/tech/engg — and programming,
1. The “primitives” and “rules of composition” are nearly the same wherever you are in the world.
2. A japanese programmer , programs in japanese , his naming conventions of the “functions”(verbs) in his program when translated
would not make perfect sense to an “english” programmer ( will actually indicate a diferent intent). ( this is true of even german/english programmers as anybody who has worked
with a deutsch programmer would tell you ). – yes true , International/multi-cultural programming teams are difficult to manage.
There are strange blends/exceptions though: Haiku generators for the english language for example.
http://www.everypoet.com/haiku/default.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_in_English
3. A “socket” is a socket , wherever you are. A “gear” is a “gear”. A “function” is a “function”. But art ?? passion ??
4. Definitely no euro-centricity here.
The selfish programmer – Elucidated
- In the open source model -
The “Computer Science” background – programmer creates tools like
Operating systems ( linux), language compilers ( gnu cpp) , software development tools ( a plethora).
The “Math” background – programmer will make math tools, Statistics packages , numerical algorithm packages etc.
The “Bio” background – programmer makes bio tools , string analyssers, protein analysis algos , bio plugins to math packages , visual modelers etc.
The “Mechanical Engineering” programmer makes FEA tools , CFD tools etc.
All “selfish” but “enabling” tools for their clique. But “good” because it is “useful” for people with their backgrounds and also probably by other inter-disciplinary users.
Example :
Question: Can a CS programmer make a bio package for R ( a statistics platform) ?
Answer: Only if he studies the biology involved to create it in the first place and understands the programming of R.
I cannot say the same (usability to others) holds for the “selfish” “creators” of art.
The following 2 claims stand :
The discussion (the ‘scholar’ part of it) is Euro-centric – because the humanities classification per se is euro-centric.
Art and the artist in the process of creating art is “selfish”. No denying it. The “programmer” is not “selfish” in the artist-sense
because he is always “programming/creating” a “computable” representation of an external computable entity — and not “creating” a representation of an internal stream of thought.
I cannot say anything about the “goodness” of art.
Rounding off ,
What would a “humanities” background programmer want created ?
That is the question i would like answered ? That would be a possible “starting” point for the conversation between the scholar and programmer. Personally speaking,would love this to take place.
Thank you,
Ersin: You must surely be interested in what was first called ‘net art’. See Rhizome.org
And also – the Oulipo group’s methodologies must compare to computer programming rules in some interesting ways.
Best wishes: from a humanities scholar and ex-programmer
Ersin –
Fun to read this, and spot-on about the importance of the lack of moods. I’d particularly emphasize the subjunctive.
We’ve talked about the great advantage of the OED being that it aims to be comprehensive (how has this word been used) rather than authoritative (what does this word mean). And you’ve read enough poetry to understand that language as technology works precisely because of the “slop” that accrues to words, and that the desire to limit such slop or do away with figurative uses of language is always mistaken in that it would strip thought of the very elements that enable it in the first place. (“accrues” was the wrong word, but whatever). My question to you: do programming “languages” have slop? if they don’t, isn’t the analogy between a programming language, and, say, English, itself a sloppy analogy, insofar as that would constitute another ground, in addition your note above on grammar, in which there is a serious dis-analogy within the analogy. Or another way at this: english, at least in this paragraph, provided a decent mediating tool to compare the languages. What would that comparison look like if it was done in, say, FORTRAN? (dating myself with that, but oh well).
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