Review of Ports and Variations by Patsy

From Maze

Goals of the chapter

This chapter should accomplish several goals:

Make it really plain • that variations on a theme is one way of performing close readings that turn out to have specific ways of being valuable. • that variations on a theme are instructive about the particular line, about the language it is written in, and about whatever it takes to run the program (e.g. hidden code, platforms, hardware, you know more about these layers than I do).

In other words, this chapter should address “variations” that make a difference, that mean something worth knowing, that educate us about the 10PRINT line itself, BASIC, the C64, etc.

Here are some of the “variations” I can imagine:

1) line edits: same language, same platform, change the variables (this is what you’ve pretty much done);

2) language implementations: translate BASIC to another language to get a similar-if-not-the-same maze-effect; (might include a bit on approximation and what’s “poetic” about the 10PRINT line).

3) port the program to another platform: what does that variation entail/invoke/alter/discard -- and why does any of it matter?

And there may be other “variations” we should consider that you all, my collaborators, will be able to imagine more readily than I. Regardless of how many “variations” we settle on, in each case there are advantages and limitations, expected or surprising behaviors, some gain and loss in the “translation” -- that ought to tell us about the value of performing these variations and about the 10PRINT program itself, of course.

So that’s what I’m thinking. I’m especially keen about this chapter because, with the maze chapter (and perhaps others that I haven’t identified yet), I think this is a chapter that will speak eloquently and visually to those humanities scholars who don’t read and write any programming code.

Outline/Organization of Chapter

I am not exactly sure how this chapter should be organized – that is something the group who ends up writing this chapter will ultimately decide. At this stage I think there are two ways to think about how to organize this chapter:

(1) by type of variation (describing what's learned in each case)

(2) by what's learnable from playing out variation scenarios

My suggestion is to write a first draft following (1) -- the sort of plodding but systematic approach that will enable us, after putting everything out there, to settle on which variations are within scope, worth discussing/interpreting/explaining, evocative, informative and/or aesthetically expressive and, even, provocative. We'll then be able re-organize the content of the chapter into a more elegant or artful approach, inviting the reader, for example, to follow our lead through several "performances" of ports and variations, and progressively building momentum with surprises and discoveries -- which, in the end, will return us and our readers back to the magic of 10 PRINT itself, the "loop" created by this approach, of course, reflecting the structural loop of the line.

My review rests on the direction Jeremy launched the chapter, which is a really great start.

I’m up for more discussion about this at any time.