- suckless and bouldering: different levels of documentation
- documentation as backdoor
Programming, as most of all the other technical worlds out there, strive to be purely technical. Immaculate from the sin of politics. It happens to read users that demand to keep politics out from code repository, even in FLOSS projects that are inherently political. Building on western tradition of separate fields of study, coding wants to be just coding. The topics around software all concern performance and speed, new updates and features. A space where all problems are technical and can be solved.
Don't think that programmers don't care. Sometimes it's just a matter of being exposed to certain ways of thinking. Before the bachelor at the Accademy of Fine Arts I've never been exposed to the writings of Donna Haraway for example, and I had no idea that feminism could have been something also for me to participate.
Here code documentation could work as a backdoor: hacking its way to people that have never been exposed to certain topics. A way to offer an entry points to other worlds, and ground political choices into technical details.
_Aesthetic Programming - A Handbook of Software Studies_, by Winnie Soon and Geoff Cox is a perfect example. The book explains the basic concepts of programming for: it starts from variables and loops to arrive to more complex topics such as machine learning. The technical offering of the text is in line with other similar resources that serves as introduction to programming for non-engineers. What's different here is a continuous commitment to critically enquiry themes such as colonialism, racism, gender and sexuality, capitalism and class, and how are they embedded in code.
