The immediate next aspect that I will be focusing on is therefore to highlight the aesthetic criteria which support two other communities of practice: hackers and artists.
aesthetics matter, even in such a highly formal, syntactical, autotelic system as a computer. they connect a surface-structure with a deep structure.
how does it contribute to the world? by showing that there is no separate domain of aesthetics, but also that they’re not essential, but a mark of high-quality and, again that they allow us to understand.
first i want to touch upon cursory work in source code poetry (paloque berges), and connect that to metaphor and literary tradition. then i want to talk about hacking (demoscene, folies, one-liners), and then connect that lack of aesthetic concern (qualify! different kinds of aesthetics) to the question of “what is there to understand” and therefore the question of semantics. i will close by exploring the different concepts in programming that are hard to communicate.
CONCEPTS:
this is not so much about code aligning with standards of literature, but maybe aligning to the standards of both epistemology and architecture, architectural knowledge, and how literature could also align with these.
transition: metaphors as architecture of thought
transition: folies and hacking
beauty in inscrutability?
Hackers -> this redirects to the understanding of the machine (e.g. trying to reduce character counts for one-liners)
ADD what makes a good PL vs. what makes a good symbol system?
good part: fits with goodman
bad part: no meaning
things that make programs complicated to understand
the MIT study on reading code:
The emphasis placed on the symbolic, cognitive, planning aspects of the arts leads us to give value to the role played by problem-solving, seeing there a model in terms of which the moment-to-moment artist’s behavior at work can be described. “An analysis of behavior as a sequence of problem- solving and planning activities seems to be most promising […]” (goodman)