Code Literacy
Comments(2) 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.
Not sure where that leaves human nature, which is amorphous. Perception is reality and everyone’s is different. It has to be, no two views of one thing can ever be the same. So what is closer to meaning?
“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
For two machines compiling a body of code, the input(code/instructions) and output(behavior) can be very similar for each machine. We could similarly construct an experiment in which a human were given an input(instructions) and we obseved the output(behavior). If the instructions were simple (take off your left shoe) we might find the exhibited behavior to be rather similar amongst multiple subjects. But as the instructions become more complex, errors will inevitably arise. The errors that arise are undoubtedly the result of past experience. By no fault of the instructions, the instructions are interpreted differently by different people. As you say, everyone is different.
So then it follows that in creating the instructions sent to the computer, we have communicated something which is closer to what we really mean. In this mode of communication, our thought patterns are tuned to express the exhibited behavior in a manner that is more readily actionable.
Without the past experience of the subject to take into account, it is the nature of the synthetic language to be agnostic to idiosyncrasies and common errors in thought. Whereas in natural language we are bluntly spouting bubbles of emotional inspiration as they flitter by, the form of code requires a far more disciplined mode of communication.
It is not possible to blackmail one’s computer into functioning as expected.