Ode or Code? Programmers be Mused!: Is your code literate or literary?

Abstract

My sermon-text this grumpy month is Matt Barton’s article “The Fine Art of Computer Programming”, in which he extols the virtues of what is widely called literate programming. As with the related terms literary and literature, we have ample room for wranglings of a theological intensity, further amplified by disputes inherent in the questions: “Is computer science or art?” and “What do programmers need to know?” Just as we must prefer agile to clumsy programming, it’s hard to knock anything literate. Competing methods tend to sound, like, man, kinda illiterate, a term with such a bad reputation that cultures that have not yet invented or borrowed a writing system are called preliterate.

References

1. Dijkstra, E.W. 1975. How do we tell truths that might hurt? http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/EWD498.html.
2. ibid.
3. ibid.
4. The frisky "horses-for-courses" idiom may not have galloped beyond Albion's shores. Even Brits use it without due process. It simply states the obvious: that objects may be differentiated ontologically by their innate purposefulness. Easy for me to say. Liverpool Dock Road cart horses do not win the Pimlico Special. Seabiscuit never hauled a ton of stolen coal. Pascal, some claimed, was a "teaching" language. C, others claimed, was "unteachable," acquired through trial and error, chiefly error.
5. Kelly-Bootle, S. 1995. The Computer Contradictionary. Cambridge: The MIT Press. My entry at Extended Basic gives the unexpurgated version.
6. A clever, illiterarily back-formed noun from the more familiar adjective infamous. This reminds me that my current bete noire is the overuse of famously, as in "As Churchill famously remarked.."
7. In keeping with my subject matter, fatidic is a more elitist, literary choice than prophetic. Was Orwell's pessimism ill founded? I leave it to my readers to decide.
8. Kelly-Bootle, S. 1988. 680x0 Programming by Example. Indianapolis: Howard W. Sams & Company. I find that I wrote in the introduction, "..one of the objects of the book is to improve your reading skills!"
9. Well-versed readers will know that Finnegans Wake is fond of an APL anagram: ALP crops up as Anna Livia Plurabelle. LitCritters get quite excited over such minutiae. I must confess my analogy is imperfect. APLers will rush to tell me that the garrulous, circular Finnegans Wake (it opens with "riverun" and ends with "the"---a sort of GOTO START endless loop) can be expressed in just three lines. Dijkstra's spin was quite acerbic: "APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums."
10. Peder Zane, J. 2007. The Top 10: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books. New York: W.W. Norton.
11. ibid.
12. Giguette, R. 2006. Building objects out of Plato: Applying philosophy, symbolism, and analogy to software design. Communications of the ACM 49(10): 66-71.
13. McGrath, R.E. 2007. Programs are not literature, even by analogy. Communications of the ACM 50(1): 11.
14. Naur, P. Computing versus human thinking. 2007. Communications of the ACM 50(1): 85-94. Well worth the reading effort. Improve your command of NL and your ability to detect and possibly ignore the odd whiffs of justified, cranky victimhood.

Index Terms

• General and reference

• Software and its engineering

  • Software creation and management

    • Software development techniques