Introduction

Unusually, this book focuses on a single line of code, a BASIC program with only two statements. Our understanding of cultural production, and of our culture overall, has been greatly advanced by studies that focus on a single work, such as Barthes’s ''S/Z,'' Beckett’s ''Proust,'' Arnheim’s ''Genesis of a Painting: Picasso’s Guernica,'' and Foucault’s ''Ceci n’est pas une pipe.'' These paintings and texts are significantly more complex than a one-line BASIC program, but the computer program is also more unusual and far less studied as a cultural artifact, so there is much more to explain regarding its context.

By analyzing this short program from multiple viewpoints, the book explains how to read code deeply and shows the insights that come from doing so. Instead of discussing software merely as an abstract formulation, this book focuses on a specific program that exists in different printed variants and executes on a particular platform. At the same time, the book considers how the program engages with the cultural imagination of the maze, the history of regular repetition and randomness in computing, the story of the BASIC programming language and the specific nature of the Commodore 64. The eponymous program is treated as a distinct cultural artifact, but it also serves as a grain of sand in which a world is visible, a Rosetta Stone that gives us important access to the phenomenon of creative computing and the way computer programs exist in culture.