Literary art and Cybernetics
Thinking more about a code review I am currently doing (By ‘code’ I mean a program set of instructions to be executed by a digital computer. By ‘review’ I mean code written by others).
I am researching and exploring the role of playful work in software development. That has led to questions about how literary art works. It seems that playful software development is related to the same kind of skills for good writing.
Playful software development, of course, is also related to scientific research on the field of Cybernetics: the study of communication and control between humans and machines, and humans and other animals (human animals included).
Reading and writing computer code is communication and control between human animals and between machines. All that, and much more, converges into the act of the code review I am doing.
Of course, reading and writing computer code is related to automatic symbolic processing. Which is, of course, the same kind of symbolic processing occurring right now in reading and writing this very paragraph in a human natural language called English.
«Computer programs are fun to write, and well-written computer programs are fun to read. One of life’s greatest pleasures can be the composition of a computer program that you know will be a pleasure for other people to read, and for yourself to read.»
— Donald E. Knuth. Literate programming. Preface (first paragraph).
