cover

outline

introduction

see tex file

aesthetic ideals

we start our journey here. basically, we look at what programmers say when they talk about beautiful code.

we see there are different kinds of lexical fields of beauty, also by including examples, which might be devoid of context for now

but we also see that all these kinds might relate to understanding. so we turn to this next

understanding code

so what’s up with understanding? turns out code is tricky to understand because

it has to talk to machines

and to humans

but maybe we can get more by relating it to other fields of aesthetics and see what they have to offer

beauty and understandings

here, we look at how literature, architecture and maths deal with beauty and understanding

now that we have stronger concepts, let’s dive back into code

aesthetic manifestations

here is where we develop more our theory.

as we have our typology, we realize that they are all a bit all over the place. is there something that binds them all? yes, programming languages, so we turn to that next to see how a medium/object/material can meet all those at once

programming languages

we see how programming languages deal with understanding between computers and humans, and how they have to provide an interface to deal with meaning.

we also look into language-dependent features, and language-independent features.

so we conclude on language as a material to embody a theory of semantico-spatial cognition

conclusion

the aesthetics of code is the symbolic progression from word to structure to idea, with each of these configurations happening at different moments and different levels of expertise in programmers, and assigning different roles to the lexical tokens visible on the screen.