Lately I have been trying to learn some programming. My mind has been shaped by thirty years of favouring the humanities, so at face value, knowing fiLately I have been trying to learn some programming. My mind has been shaped by thirty years of favouring the humanities, so at face value, knowing fifty ways of writing 'hello world!' is not exactly thrilling. Of course there is a lot more to it than that: tantalising analogies with formal logic and linguistics open wide speculative vistas too, though again those were areas I never really dared to look into, precisely because of the 'symbolic compression' they share with programming.
To keep myself on track, I have tried to fill my prized leisure-time with books not of programming but about programming, from a general introduction to how hardware actually work, to a history of computing from Pascal onward. I also looked for fiction about programming: code, after all, is probably the root metaphor for culture, and as such could make a compelling theme for a novel. Surprisingly, however, I found little that deals expressly with the subject. Ullman received some accolades, mostly for her non-fiction and for being among the rare women to witness the personal-computing revolution (mostly leaning in, I think) - and until Dunkle Zahlen is translated (or my German somehow drastically improves) I thought this one would do the job.
In a nutshell, narration is divided between Roberta, a linguistics PHD who ends up testing software after failing to build a career in academia, and Ethan, another failed academic turned computer wiz. Both work, in the early eighties, for a start-up building B2B data-base softwares, of which Ethan is put in charge of the graphic interface. Both are full of resentment with their situation, and their private lives suffer from it, as it does from the strictures the computer imposes on their minds. When Roberta identifies a particularly nasty bug with the graphic interface, they are brought together in a frustrated quest to track down the culprit, which proves to be lastingly elusive. Ethan, plagued by anxieties in all the wrong places, descends into delirium. As the bug, now christened 'The Jester' by company-culture, slowly take over his life, Roberta watches from the side-lines.
If that does not sound like the most original plot in the world, it's because it isn't. Ullman does promise, in the spirit of her celebrated non-fiction, to afford the reader a glimpse of the world of programming, its rites and jargon, its hierarchies and its symbols. That much she does alright, in the colloquial manner of the tour guide rather than in any details: enough to gain some feeling of familiarity with the machine, not enough to actually understand much of how it works. Roberta's own discovery of the subject serves as an introduction, and the tour though predictable, is enjoyable enough. The main issue shines through pretty quickly, namely the abysmally flat supporting cast. Even her two 'heroes' are hardly convincing. Roberta, and especially Ethan, are fundamentally maladjusted characters, embodying that lasting myth of neck-beard romanticism: the all-too-rational genius, who cannot cope with society's indulgent fuzziness, and seeks refuge in the certainties of science. Along comes of course the smug and naive satisfaction of the Silicon Valley self-made man, foreclosing any sense of political or personal responsibility. The reader cannot decide whether their tedious love-life and dedication to routine is supposed to be tragic or comical, while the slow trickling out of the secondary characters from their unravelling lives is welcomed with a sigh of relief (special mention here to the big-breasted bisexual German sys-admin, who listens to Einstürzende Neubauten: a very nineties trope, though the book is set in the eighties and written in the noughties).
Characterisation, then, is dreadful, but not all is as bad. As probably befits a novel, it is the emotional experience of the programmer which really shines through, and here we have a few moments of bravery: "For the first time, I understood there was a mapping between the symbolic words of the code and the physical existence of the machine. And something in me shifted. I decided I already knew far too much about words . . . Now I wanted to know more about the machine." (171) This is an epiphany I went through not long ago, realising how successfully stacks and interface eclipse the materiality of computing. Similarly, Ullman has some insights into the ecstatic pleasures of formality, of letting language speaks: "The cleanliness of programming was a balm. I had spent months unlearning the desire to be unique. I was trying to write code so standard in form, so common in expression, that my work, ideally, could not be distinguished from another programmer's. I was striving for a certain clarity and simplicity, a form of impersonal beauty" (176).
The problem, then, is not that the author is incompetent, but that she eagerly substantiates the platitude on computer-people being oblivious to social reality, a self-fulfilling observation which luckily is today in the process of being disproved. I suspect it was a side-effect of computing moving from research-tool to consumer-product, and the consequent reshuffling of software engineers class identity. This also shows in her handling of technology as a theme, whose impact is seen exclusively on the individual, never in collective, let alone political terms. The idea of the bug-haunting, which if not groundbreaking still had potential, is not very much exploited: Ullman's dignified concern with the neighbours' music at night, or the boyfriend not returning the calls leaves little room for technognostic considerations. 'The jester' is thus neither PK Dick nor Kafka, but rather some interesting backdrop to the uninteresting lives of its victims.
All in all, the book is a disappointment. It points to what a novel on programming could be, it gestures toward a rarely acknowledged subjective dimension of coding, and has some poetic insights into the process, but is irreparably mired with very poor characterisation and lacklustre plotting....more
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