Carnet de Stéphane Couture

Entretien sur le code source

Il y a quelques semaines, j'ai eu un entretien extrêmement stimulant avec Simon Denier, actuellement postdoctorant au département d'informatique et de recherche opérationnellle (DIRO) de l'Université de Montréal. Nous avons discuté de la programmation par aspect, de la programmation littéraire, des Design Patterns, de l'expressivité des langages de programmation, de la beauté du code, etc. Simon m'a également envoyé quelques "cas atypiques" qui sont assez intéressants. J'en partage quelques uns ici:

The Shakespeare Programming Language
"The design goal was to make a language with beautiful source code that resembled Shakespeare plays. There are no fancy data or control structures, just basic arithmetic and gotos. You could say we have combined the expressiveness of BASIC with the user-friendliness of assembly language"

Codology and Critical Code Studies
"To critique code merely for its functionality or aesthetics is to approach code with only a small portion of our analytic tools. In Life on the Screen (1995), Sherry Turkle describes the Julia effect by which interactors ascribe intentionality and sentience to the computer that might display "Hello World" (101). People like to project humanity onto the computer, but is it possible that with regard to coding we do just the opposite and strip the code of its human significance, imagining that it is a sign system within which the extensive analyses of semiotic systems and signification, connotation, and denotation do not apply? Is "Hello World," a rite of passage into computer languages, the beginning of a literacy constrained by restricted interpretation? What would happen if we began to interpret the meaning of the code?"