Coding Contingencies (CC) is a procedural take on how different characters got to code.
How did they choose a particular programming language, a coding paradigm, a development environment, an infrastructure where to run the code, and so on? These are not just technical choices, but rather coding contingencies.
Personal decisions, trending technologies, curiosity and boredom, to name a few. A talk on esolangs as form of frugality, a collegue passionate about live coding that drags you to an algorave night, a crypto-boyfriend, the tech stack of a company, a drastic turn of events, etc. etc.
These contingencies are situated in precise contexts.
Programming then is not just sharing code, but sharing context.
It's providing a point of view and a perspective to look at the world, before attempting to get some grip onto it with a script.
Using the simulation as a writing machine we can articulate these CC with some benefits:
1. Suspension of judgment
Within the scope of the simulation it's not necessary to label good or bad choices.
One character could decide one morning to write their own operative system from scratch using Red Stone circuits in Minecraft, and it would be fine.
Due to the nature of the process, even the most absurd starting point it's a valid and powerful narrative device.
In this way it becomes easier to explore marginal cases, improbabilities, and non-conform situations.
2. Discrete temporality
A simulation does not happen all at once, instead it is a process that evolves through time.
This happens in both discrete steps and long-term iterations.
Discrete steps can be further subdivided or grouped together, with the possibility of magnifying details, and the ability of zooming in and out a story.
Long-term iterations are a way to keep asking _what's next? what's next?_ to the machine. At every cycle, the simulation reaches out to each partecipant and asks for an update. In this way all the actors and relations develop in parallel.
3. Partiality
Partecipants entangle gradually, and do not come as a monolithic block.
They can be imagined as lines: merging together and branching away, tying and loosening knots. (Ingold)
This leads to multi-facets characters, where not all the elements needs to interact with each other all the time.
A subtle sense of direction emerge from the initial randomness.
(By design) the simulation sees software as a mean to orientate these trajectories.
How does certain programming languages facilitate certain ways of thinking, and totally block some others?
This procedure helps us to think about software as cultural object. Something "deeply woven into contemporary life –economically, culturally, creatively, politically– in manners both obvious and nearly invisible." (Software Studies, 2009), and not just as technical tool existing in a vacuum.
see how there are a lot of open questions in the first and third fields, while the programming language is slightly more defined and fixed. this is a good starting point. obviously a programming language is vast and complex and with dozen of features one could be interested in, but for the sake of our system it is useful to leave these things unsaid.
we can use the software as a pivot to orientate the relation between the actor and their intentions.
from where they are coming and where do they want to go?
who took them there?
what do they need?
which particular aspect of pure data resonates with their view of the world?
is it the open source nature and the licensing of the source code?
the welcoming community thriving around the programming language?
or the visual paradigm that facilitates the thinking about and connecting abstractions together?
