@ -14,8 +14,6 @@ Programming then is not just sharing code, but sharing context. A significant st
It's an approach that helps us to think about software as a 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.
It's an approach that helps us to think about software as a 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.
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An object that, in turn, can be used to probe its surroundings. Who is developing? Who is paying? For what cause? Who is gonna use it? How is it structured? It is a big and centralized system or a loose collection of small and interchangable tools?
An object that, in turn, can be used to probe its surroundings. Who is developing? Who is paying? For what cause? Who is gonna use it? How is it structured? It is a big and centralized system or a loose collection of small and interchangable tools?
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@ -44,10 +42,12 @@ These critical questions relate with software from different angles and distance
- disproportion of means
- disproportion of means
- mistification
- mistification
Software development is a disease writes Ellen Ullman (Ullman, 2017), and this disease has several consequences. The first one is that it comes in forms that are basically alien to us. It's a virus that works and thinks differently, and to get your head around it requires a lot of effort. It's not just mnemonic knowledge, but, as learning a foreign language, it's a radical change in the way one organizes their thoughts.
Software development is a disease, writes Ellen Ullman (Ullman, 2017), and this disease has several consequences. The first one is that it comes in forms that are basically alien to us. It's a virus that works and thinks differently, and to get your head around it requires a lot of effort. It's not just mnemonic knowledge, but, as learning a foreign language, it's a radical change in the way one organizes their thoughts.
This often comes with intimidating learning curves, that get twisted even more with the tangled list of dependencies that every system carries on its back. Where to start is always a rabbit hole: there is always something more low or high level, and the linked list of references seems a Moebious strip.
This often comes with intimidating learning curves, that get twisted even more with the tangled list of dependencies that every system carries on its back. Where to start is always a rabbit hole: there is always something more low or high level, and the linked list of references seems a Moebious strip.
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Another symptom of the developer disease is found on the other side of the gradient: in the fever of coding easy problems generate complicate solutions. Probably over-engineering comes with the current perceived abundance of computational power of modern machines. Probably programmers back in the days would have been hesitant of reserving 2GB of RAM on their machine to run a todo list app written with the brand new reactive framework in a browser. The very same reactive framework is built with an amazing network of open source contributions that fade far away on the horizon of a package manager.
Another symptom of the developer disease is found on the other side of the gradient: in the fever of coding easy problems generate complicate solutions. Probably over-engineering comes with the current perceived abundance of computational power of modern machines. Probably programmers back in the days would have been hesitant of reserving 2GB of RAM on their machine to run a todo list app written with the brand new reactive framework in a browser. The very same reactive framework is built with an amazing network of open source contributions that fade far away on the horizon of a package manager.
This evergrowing structure is fascinating and scary, and resembles the kind of architecture that Nihei imagined when drawing the city of Blame! An unsupervised and perennial construction site assembled by IAs surpassing the diameter of the Jupither's orbit. The inaccessibility of complexity is really suited to this kind of aesthetic explorations, but lends itself also to process of mistification and mis-representation that often characterize processes of propaganda, populism and one-sided information.
This evergrowing structure is fascinating and scary, and resembles the kind of architecture that Nihei imagined when drawing the city of Blame! An unsupervised and perennial construction site assembled by IAs surpassing the diameter of the Jupither's orbit. The inaccessibility of complexity is really suited to this kind of aesthetic explorations, but lends itself also to process of mistification and mis-representation that often characterize processes of propaganda, populism and one-sided information.
