„Critical Code Studies“

I think its inappropriate for people who don't know much about programming to try reading code to critically understand the underlying social mechanisms behind computerization in the modern era.

But saying something like the construction of "Hello World" is arbitrary is also ridiculous. If formal logic were just as it is, something pure and untouchable, then there wouldn't be so many different programming languages with so many different ways of outputting the same string. The logic of programming languages also in some ways intersects with the logic of social life. There is always a need for interpretation, from someone writing an actual interpreter, to a new engineer trying to decipher some uncommented code--even that last example proves the point more severely, people have a variety of "styles" of writing code: if formal logic was just a One, there would only ever be one "best" programming language and one "best" style. But there is not. There is instead some diverse, human force and human effort behind code, and that effort must reflect in some way the overall structure of the society it was created in. And likewise the order of society (which has in some sense been engineered) influences the programmers and the limits of their ideas.

Is there something about the operations of computers that escapes pure social construction? Obviously yes, there is always something about the structure of logic which describes how social relations come to be (even if it must be understood social-symbolically), and the way in which those relations are coded has greatly contributed to the overall increase of productivity in the 20th and 21st centuries. But there is nothing "pure" about that logic.

git branch -d god git branch -d master