The Case for Software Criticism

The writer of this article seems confused, his examples of "technological criticism" are more about the technological society than the technology but he seems to be advocating for the more specialized form of criticism such as literary criticism which software is not really developed enough for and this sort of criticism is an outgrowth of theory, not some general push for "criticism" as a field.

I suspect we already have a culture of software (or at least programming) criticism in the CS journals, most fields have them and they are a natural evolution of the journals, but it takes some times for the culture and vocabulary to develop. Music* and literature are the only two fields which have well developed fields of criticism, art and film are close but their medium is not written and that forces them to go into rather vague and subjective areas. The technology has been around for awhile now for art and film (and software) to exploit their own mediums for criticism but I have yet to see it, we can analyze the importance of the smile on Mona Lisa's face and reproduce it with her having different expressions without much effort.

We absolutely have code level criticism but it has yet to coalesce, a book on data structures which explores their forms over time, how those forms affect the whole, strengths/weaknesses, etc is criticism and not much different than works of literary criticism like Closure in the Novel, The Machine in the Garden or Mimesis which all take one aspect of literature and explore its different executions and forms; the ending, technology v nature, and reality respectively.

*Music theory is largely a written discipline—a mix of on the staff and in written language—and as I said, criticism is an extension of theory.

The people who could competently criticize software are too busy patching failing systems. You could listen to their critiques over several beers after their latest fixit NOW emergency. That is assuming that it's not one emergency after another.

lol ... why indeed. The core reasons software criticism doesn't exist as it might for other tangible products seems to have eluded the author. Simply it's more a case of YMMV and amount of sale pitch circulating on the web at the time. Only someone who had a great deal of depth in the same field could really know what should be there, but being nothing like a novice will more often have a completely different user experience.