TITLE: A Commonplace for Novelists and Programmers AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: December 03, 2010 3:56 PM DESC: ----- BODY:
To be a moral human being is to pay, be obliged to pay, certain kinds of attention. -- Susan Sontag, "The Novelist and Moral Reasoning"
For some reason, this struck me yesterday as important, not just as a human being, but also as a programmer. I am reminded that many of my friends and colleagues in the software world speak passionately of our moral obligations when writing code. The software patterns community, especially, harkens to Christopher Alexander's call regarding the moral responsibility of creators. (If you want to read more from Sontag without tracking down her essay, check out this transcript excerpted from a speech she gave in 2004.) -----