TITLE: Porting Programs, Refactoring, and Language Translation
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: May 31, 2017 2:28 PM
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In his commonplace book A Certain World, W.H. Auden
quotes C.S. Lewis on the controversial nature of tramslation:
[T]ranslation, by its very nature, is a continuous implicit
commentary. It can become less tendentious only by becoming
less of a translation.
Lewis was merely acknowledging a truth about language: Translators
must have a point of view, and often that point of view will be
controversial.
I once saw Kurt Vonnegut speak with a foreign language class here
many years ago. One of the students asked him what he thought
about the quality of the translations done for his book. Vonnegut
laughed and said that his books were so peculiar and so steeped in
Americana that translating one was akin to writing a new book. He
said that his translators deserved all the royalties from the books
they created by translating him. They had to write brand new works.
These memories came to mind again recently while I was reading Tyler
Cowen's
conversation with Jhumpa Lahiri,
especially when Lahiri said this:
At one point I was talking about this idea, in antiquity: in
Latin, the word for "translator" is "interpreter". I teach
translation now, and I talk a lot to my students about
translation being the most intimate form of reading and how
there was the time when translating and interpreting and
analyzing were all one thing.
As my mind usually does, it began to think about computer programs.
Like many programmers, I often find myself porting a program from
one language to another. This is clearly translation but, as
Vonnegut and and Lahiri tell us, it is also a form of interpretation.
To port a piece of code, I have to understand its meaning and express
that meaning in a new language. That language has its own constructs,
idioms, patterns, and set of community practices and expectations.
To port a program, one must have a point of view, so the process can
be, to use Lewis's word, tendentious.
I often refactor code, too, both my own programs and programs written
by others. This, too, is a form of translation, even though it
leaves the new code written in the same language as the original.
Refactoring is necessarily an opinionated act, and thus tendentious.
Occasionally, I refactor a program in order to learn what it does and
how it does it. In those cases, I'm not judging the original code as
anything but ill-suited to my current state of knowledge. Even so,
when I get done, I usually like my version better, if only a little
bit. It expresses what I learned in the process of rewriting the code.
It has always been hard for me to port a program without refactoring
it, and now I understand why. Both activities are a kind of
translation, and translation is by its nature an activity that
requires a point of view.
This fall, I will again teach our "Translation of Programming Languages"
course. Writing a compiler requires one to become intimate not only
with specific programs, the behavior of which the compiler must
preserve, but also the language itself. At the end of the project, my
students know the grammar, syntax, and semantics of our source language
in a close, almost personal way. The target language, too. I don't
mind if my students develop a strong point of view, even a
controversial one, along the way. (I'm actually disappointed if the
stronger students do not!) That's a part of writing new software, too.
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