Introduction

From Maze

Even those who have no interest in the playful, aesthetic, and educational dimensions of computing cannot ignore the cultural relevance of code. Computer programs not only function to process and display critical data, to facilitate communication, to monitor and report on sensor networks, and to shoot down incoming missiles - they also have an existence as texts that are read by the original programmer, others who maintain and modify them, and in many cases wider and wider circles of meaning-seekers. We now live in a world where citizens examine the leaked source code that causes our voting machines to function. We find it unremarkable that particular snippets of code written by scientists are quoted in an attempt to demonstrate that climate change is a scam. It is no longer tenable to pretend that computer code is purely technical, without social, political, cultural, or other significant dimensions.

"So why bother trying to understand this line of code?" If computer code embeds stories, then every symbol within it then so does learning it. A first-time reader of a line of code experiences it in a completely different way. And many readers may wonder

I am quite in the dark: the feeling is akin to trying to read legal code or, sometimes, the IRS code. I feel like I ought to get it, but I don’t, and I won’t. Mastery of the English language is woefully insufficient to make sense of this line unless I read it as poetry. It may look like English, but it’s not, so reading it as poetry is, well, practically unfair to the tradition of English poetry.