Software is at once a field of study, an industry, a career, a process of production, and a process of consumption—and only then a body of computer code (Page 2)

provoke new patterns of thought in human readers and scholars (Page 2)

formulated using the human-constructed tools of mathematics, language, and code (Page 2)

participates as a link in a chain of dialogue (Page 3)

in the physical act of writing code, we are in dialogue with our computer and development environment (Page 4)

shepherding: “It’s not what programming languages do, it’s what they shepherd you to.” (Page 5)

an invisible property of a programming language and its ecosystem that drives people into solving problems in ways that are natural for the programming language itself rather than ways that are considered ‘better’ in some sense” (Page 5)

obscured chains of dialogue are present in everything (Page 6)

my taste in music and sense of humor are mediated by this mutual recursion between the algorithms and the real world (Page 10)

the robots became part of the game, and the robots played against each othe (Page 12)

what software is good for (Page 13)

it never enables anything truly new, but rather changes the constant factors of speed and marginal cost (Page 13)

raises the barrier for participation arbitrarily high (Page 13)

What are the answers to those economic questions, if not capital—or better yet, what questions should we be asking, if not economic? (Page 16)

Pakkanen, Jussi. “It’s Not What Programming Languages Do, It’s What The Shepherd You To.” Nibble Stew, March 6, 2020 (Page 17)

the plural form of computer, Internet, (View Highlight)

(View Highlight)

Software is at once a field of study, an industry, a career, a process of production, and a process of consumption—and only then a body of computer code. (View Highlight)

Code is always addressed to someone. As Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs puts it, “programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute” (View Highlight)

Any code that we write, no matter how experimental or novel, owes a piece of its existence to someone else, and participates as a link in a chain of dialogue, one in reply to another. (View Highlight)

We internalize the voices of our social relations, and these voices mediate our action. Every time we dive into a codebase, speak with a mentor, take a course, or watch a conference talk, we are deliberately adding new voices to the little bag of voices in our mind. This is not purely a process of consumption: in internalizing voices, we form counter-words, mentally argue with them, and ventriloquize them through our own work—in a word, we engage in a dialogue. (View Highlight)