the art of code

## maurice j. black

• ‘classical’ definition of aesthetics in use in the majority of software development (efficiency, elegance)
• • what are some other definitions of aesthetics?

hypothesis: textual aesthetics have constituted a fundamental component of programming practice and culture

• at the nexus of literature and computing culture’s distinct but related aesthetic frames

5 goals: 1. how did computer architecture and programming paradigms have affected aesthetics of code 2. historiography of code 3. show how a clear literary aesthetic emerged as part of a programming practice 4. how a literary appreciation of programming informs literary theory itself (example with finnegan’s wake) 5. redefine “the literary” and “the aesthetic” in classical literary theory

the mutual abstraction of code into language and of language into code. there is indeed an assumption of the literary: beauty is literary, rather than beauty is procedural, with the involvement of words

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