TITLE: Language Driving Programming
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: April 12, 2009  6:46 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
William Stafford's <EM>Writing the Australian
Crawl</EM> includes several essays on language,
words, and diction in poetry.  Words and language
-- he and others say -- are co-authors of poems.
Their shapes and sounds drive the writer in
unexpected ways and give rise to unexpected
results, which are the poems that they needed to
write, whatever they had in mind when they started.
This idea seems fundamental to the process of
creation for most poets.

We in CS think a lot about language.  It is part
of the fabric of our discipline, even when we don't
deal in software.  Some of us in CS education think
and talk way too much about programming languages:
Pascal!  Java!  Ada!  Scheme!

But even if we grant that there is
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2009-04.html#e2009-04-09T19_48_44.htm">
   art in programming and programs</A>,
can we say that language drives us as we build
our software?  That language is the co-author of
our programs?  That its words and shapes (and
sounds?) drive the programmer in unexpected ways
and gives rise to unexpected results, which are
the programs we need to write, whatever we have
in mind when we start?  Can the programmer's
experience resemble in any way the poet's
experience that Stafford describes?

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
[Language] begins to distort, by congealing parts
of the total experience into successive, partially
relevant signals....  [It] begins to enhance the
experience because of a weird quality of language:
the successive distortions of language have their
own cumulative potential, and under certain
conditions the distortions of language can 
reverberate into new experiences more various,
more powerful, and more revealing than the
experiences that set off language in the first
place.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

Successive distortions with cumulative potential...
Programmers tend not to like it when the language
they use, or must use, distorts what they want to
say, and the cumulative effects of such distortions
in a program that can give us something that feels
cumbersome, feels wrong, <EM>is</EM> wrong.

Still...  I think of my experiences coding in
Smalltalk and Scheme, and recall hearing others
tell similar tales.  I have felt Smalltalk push me
towards objects I wasn't planning to write, even
to objects of a kind I had previously been unaware.
Null objects, and numbers as control structures;
objects as streams of behavior.  Patterns of
object-oriented programs often give rise to
mythical objects that don't exist in the world,
which belies OOP's oft-stated intention to build
accurate models of the world.  I have felt Scheme
push me toward abstractions I did not know existed
until just that moment, abstractions so abstract
that they make me -- and many a programmer already
fearful of functional style -- uncomfortable.  Yet
it is simply the correct code to write.

For me:  Smalltalk and Lisp and Scheme, yes.
Maybe Ruby.  Not Java.  C?

Is my question even meaningful?  Or am I drowning
in my own inability to maintain suitable boundaries
between things that don't belong together?
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