We're about to launch into a discussion of literary programming. It's important to take a few steps back — too many have fallen under the trance of code-as-literature and literature-as-code. Something that this essay may or may not do. The real aim here is to outline the level at which texts are concerned with conveying a density of meaning, something which both code and literature aspire to do. It's not because they happen to use the same symbolic atoms, the alphanumeric letters, but because they are both forms of symbolic communication, they are both writing, and the very fact of being textual determines quite a bit about their strategies for making meaning. John Cayley sounds a
good cautionary note, in his essay, "The Code is not The Text":
"The mutual transparency and translatability of code and language
becomes a utopian value, and when it is recast as the postmodern
virtual-visceral banal — as the mutual infection-contamination of
language by code and code by language — it becomes a subversive (i.e.
potentially progressive) utopian value. Basically, my argument is that,
in much existing codework, this is as far as we get. [...] The code is
in the text or the text is in the code, and it's there because it can
be, and that's what we have to say about it."
Programs, when run by machines, are
not acting in a literary way. All that the machine ever runs is machine language, a steady, redundant stream of ones and zeros that never seems to do anything more than fiddly little operations on numbers. The actions that it does are finite, unambiguous and literal-minded — typographic operations. However, we would do well not to confuse the material with the audience, the code with the machine and the words with the reader. As an opposite to the way that Shakespeare
loses his literary qualities when processed into word lists, code can work as literature
when read by people who understand it. When an algorithm is read instead of processed, its algorithmic qualities are held off, suspended in a potential state until a machine comes back into the picture. Suddenly, word choice and style become significant, elegant ways of programming become beautiful to read and understand, and thoughts and emotions and born in the reader's mind. Often, programmers will say, "I'm not going to tell you how it works. Let me just
show you." The code speaks better about the particular ideas than words could hope to.
