@ -35,7 +35,7 @@ All computer software controls are linguistic regardless of their perceivable sh
The converse to utopian language designs occurs when computer control languages get appropriated and used informally in everyday culture. Jonathan Swift tells how scientists on the flying island of Lagado “would, for example, praise the beauty of a woman, or any other animal . . . by rhombs, circles, parallelograms, ellipses, and other “geometrical terms.” 11 Likewise, there is programming language poetry which, unlike most algorithmic poetry, writes its program source as the poetical work, or crossbreeds cybernetic with common human languages. These “code poems” or “codeworks” often play with the interference between human agency and programmed processes in computer networks.
In computer programming and computer science, “code” is often understood either as a synonym of computer programming language or as a text written in such a language. This modern usage of the term “code” differs from the traditional mathematical and cryptographic notion of code as a set of formal transformation rules that transcribe one group of symbols to another group of symbols, for example, written letters into morse beeps. The translation that occurs when a text in a programming language gets compiled into machine instructions is not an encoding in this sense because the process is not oneto-one reversible. This is why proprietary software companies can keep their source “code” secret. It is likely that the computer cultural understanding of “code” is historically derived from the name of the first high-level computer programming language, “Short Code” from 1950.12 The only programming language that is a code in the original sense is assembly language, the human-readable mnemonic one-to-one representation of processor instructions. Conversely, those instructions can be coded back, or “disassembled,” into assembly language.
In computer programming and computer science, “code” is often understood either as a synonym of computer programming language or as a text written in such a language. This modern usage of the term “code” differs from the traditional mathematical and cryptographic notion of code as a set of formal transformation rules that transcribe one group of symbols to another group of symbols, for example, written letters into morse beeps. The translation that occurs when a text in a programming language gets compiled into machine instructions is not an encoding in this sense because the process is not oneto-one reversible. This is why proprietary software companies can keep their source “code” secret. It is likely that the computer cultural understanding of “code” is historically derived from the name of the first high-level computer programming language, “Short Code” from 1950.12 The only programming language that is a code in the original sense is assembly language, the human-readable mnemonic one-to-one representation of processor instructions. Conversely, those instructions can be coded back, or “disassembled,” into assembly language.
Software as a whole is not only “code” but a symbolic form involving cultural practices of its employment and appropriation. But since writing in a computer control language is what materially makes up software, critical thinking about computers is not possible without an informed understanding of the structural formalism of its control languages. Artists and activists since the French Oulipo poets and the MIT hackers in the 1960s have shown how their limitations can be embraced as creative challenges. Likewise, it is incumbent upon critics to reflect the sometimes more and sometimes less amusing constraints and game rules computer control languages write into culture.
