KevBurnsJr

It was not long ago that literacy was a profession. To be a scribe was to be amongst a small number of people capable of transmitting complex concepts through written words. Ideas encoded in the syntax of natural language. Seeing today that literacy is common place in any society with the means to educate its population, I wonder on the future of my profession. Will algorithmic literacy become common place in the coming generations? Synthetic languages taught alongside natural? English as core a subject to our education as UML? Grammar taught beside control flow?

As humans, our thoughts are subject to becoming twisted and munged. Informal scope lays the ground for false assumptions in a medium where emotion holds sway over our actions.

If natural language is a means by which to communicate our thoughts, then isn’t code but a similar means of communicating something which is closer to meaning?

In this way, a script might be seen as a sheet of music. Useful in its own right in the confides of a capable and accessible server, but more than that in its plasticity and symbolic representability. A sort of error-proof story to be told a thousand times a second by machines a world away.

Life is too short to submit to creating poorly constructed stories. Synthetic or natural.