This is the paradox that Vikram Chandra attempts to solve in his novel, titled Geek Sublime. My life between literature and code (Egg editions). The title of the original English edition is even more explicit about the contents of the book Geek Sublime: Writing Fiction, Coding Software (Faber & Faber). One would immediately wonder: what is the relationship between writing stories and writing software? There is, there is the author says that it is both. It's the beauty.
In the first pages of the book referring to the seminal work of Paul Graham (inventor of the LISP language) and his Hackers & painters, and speaking of Leonardo da Vinci's work he immediately draws a sublime parallel, he writes:
Great software [as well as Leonardo's work] demands a fanatical devotion to beauty. If you look inside good software you discover that even the smallest details destined not to be seen by anyone are pure beauty.
This was also a mantra of Steve Jobs who repeated to his collaborators by selling an overlooked detail: "If you are a good carpenter you don't stick a sheet of plywood behind a wardrobe because nobody sees it". Got it Ikea!
The story that Chandra tells in the book, partially autobiographical, considers and then questions the possibility of matching theaesthetic lighting with the mathematical perfection. The common basis is creativity and beauty.
The writer of Indian origin experiences an alternative way to art, using logic and precisely the programming language, to grasp the nature of those mysteries which in the society of the "two cultures" are considered closed to rationality. Hence the title of Geek Gorgeous, which literally means "the sublime of the developer", a sort of oxymoron that in just two words contains the essence of Chandra's novel, namely the collision from scientific calculation e artistic intuition.
According to some insiders, in fact, an activity like the programming of computers can allow those who practice to rise to the degree of poet. This conception, more original than bizarre, arises from the fact that the programming languageit works like any other type of human language, so much so that his more present surprising analogy with the grammar rules of the Sanskrit language, formalized by the scholar Panini in 500 BC
Analogies between programming language and Sanskrit language
The task of the programmer and of to write un source code, using a language that is similar to the human one even in the type of errors which one may run into, such as syntactic or semantic ones. Like Sanskrit, the language systemwithin which the moves geek it is in fact grammaticalized, since it works according to pre-established rules, instead of using grammar to describe the language, i.e. the norm is born before the language itself.
The language of programming has its own grammatical system e lexicalspecially created for allow man to to communicate information to a computer, while Sanskrit comes from an even more formal language, the Vedic, belonging to the oldest of the Indo-European families. The tongue Sanskrit is a perfect system, whose grammar regulates every single syntactic mechanism, so much so that its balance and its completeness have suggested to Vikram Chandra the image of a strange one anello is combines algorithm and poetry.
The permanence/overcoming of opposites
Chandra filmed during a copy signing. The world of software development is dominated by male culture which is equated with rationality and logic.
In an attempt to reassemble the connessioni increasingly weaker uniting scientific culture to that humanistic, Chandra especially notes the distinction of gender that unites the sector of programming and the strategy of subjection of the indian people by the British Empire. In both cases, intelligence is seen as an exclusively masculine quality, while the concept of "feminine", whose complexity ends up being reduced to a stereotyped "femininity", refers exclusively to what is irrational and illogical.
Chandra explains how the Indian culture was in a sense"contaminated" from western thought and from a traditional attitude Manichean, which tends to locate principlesopposites to consider as much irreconcilable, how much absolute. A vision of the world as well macist e rationalistic is what distinguishes currently the world ofICT, although very many women have contributed to the development of this science, starting with English Lady Ada Lovelace, who invented computer programming in the XNUMXth century.
In essence, there are many ways in which the human spirit can succeed in uplifting itself. It would be unfair to identify in art a concept of universal sublime, excluding a priori the possibility di to include in it the beauty , pure seeds of mathematics. Strengthened by the profound knowledge of two decidedly distant cultures, the Indian and the American one, Chandra therefore faces an inner and universal journey, the outcome of which confirms and at the same time denies the opposition between man and woman, between scientist and artist, between developer and poet.
We now leave you to read, in the Italian translation, the review published in the NYTimes by James Gleik of the book GeekGorgeous by Vikram Chandra. The title of the review is "A UnifiedTheory".
The abyss of misunderstanding between scientists and humanists
And which side are you on? Here's Snow's litmus test: who no herexplain the second law of thermodynamics it's a ignorant, just like a scientist who can't quote Shakespeare.
In the twenty-first century, our way of thinking has remained the same, while the margins of error have changed. Many people can talk about thermodynamics or Shakespeare with the same ease, although no one has ever explained the second law in this regard better than Tom Stoppard, in his play entitled Arcadia"one can no longer divide what has been mixed”. You may also be familiar with scientific expressions such as litmus test, but that's not the point: you know what a hash backgammon? It's a linked list? It's a Bubble Black? Sure you can write, but can you write code?
The mystique of code creation
Vikram Chandra is an excellent novelist and apparently also knows about algorithms. his book, Sublime geek, was a revelation, also because it is completely different from all his previous works. Sublime geek, "the sublime of the geek", is a bizarre and discouraging title, which however hides the real ambition of the novel: to investigate thoroughly and with great attention connessioni and tensions is connect the world of tech and that ofart, i.e. the two cultures. While turning into a subtle disquisition on theaesthetics, the story is also partly autobiographical, as it tells the story of a boy who finds his way from India to the West and vice versa, but also from literature to programming and vice versa.
This vision the clash of cultures therefore appears much more complex than Snow's, perhaps because Chandra has experienced far more than two. When he was still a student and a budding novelist, he supported himself by programming computers in Houston, where he began to discover culture hypersustained of Silicon Valley. Although that of the queues warriors, Or the code creators, or hackers either mystique deeply introspective, as well as male, aggressive e cold, some of them yes they consider artists, claiming to aim as much at effectiveness as at beauty: "developers are more creators than scientists," says LISP inventor Paul Graham in his manifesto.
Chandra has been able to fully grasp the exhilarating creative skill that these people feel di to possess. Writes:
I work within an orderly and simplified hallucination, in a Maya, which is illusion and non-illusion. The code that I write unleashes a mysterious magic and indecipherable, which allows me to move objects in the real world and send messages to the other side of the world”. But does it really take so little to be able to define poets?
A masculine “art”?
Incidentally, programming has not always been a purely male activity, on the contrary, at the beginning it was considered female. Not only was a woman invented, Ada Lovelace, in 1840, but the "human computers" who worked on the atomic bomb project in the laboratories of Los Alamos, as well as the "Eniac girls”, who programmed computers for John Von Neumann in the XNUMXs. Chandra tells how the sectoryes it is progressively "masculinized” because of the masculine imprint that has been given to aptitude tests, which have caused a significant influx of those programmers that a psychoanalyst has defined as "often self-centered and a little neurotic", with sandals and a long beard, "great sage" style. Impact, all of this Recallssomething else, i.e. the gender politics implemented in Indiadall'British Empire.
The colonizers used a rhetoric that condemned the effeminacy of the subject peoples. Chandra writes:
The cult of virility was one of the principles on which was based theBritish Empire. Intelligence and intellectual abilities were inextricably linked to manhood concept, while it was thought that women and all those who manifested symptoms of effeminacy they were ambiguous people, irrational it's too much emotional. In particular, it was believed that not could formulate any reasoning of type scientific and that they therefore could not have self-knowledge or evolve. The fact that women had no power and that the Indians were dominated by the British seemed to confirm the truth of these claims and therefore the existence of the two cultures.
Generative grammar
When I was studying linguistics at university (it was still the twentieth century), "generative grammar", that is, the algorithmic syntax proposed by Noam Chomsky. The latter advanced the hypothesis according to which all i languages existing in nature have a basic structure which can be decoded and reconstructed according to a rigid rules system. What I didn't know at the time is that generative grammar was invented in India 2500 years ago.
Around 500 BC. C., the Indian grammarian Panini conducted an extremely thorough analysis of the Sanskrit, reaching a degree of complexity that has never been equaled in any other language. His grammar,Ashtadhyayi, collects approx 4000 rules, which allow to generate all possible sentences in Sanskrit starting from roots representing a sound or meaning, i.e. i phonemes and morphemes.
The work then includes definitions, headers e operational rules, such as “substitution, affixation, emphasis and combination”, and finally the “metarules”, which call the other rules recursively. Sound familiar? Panini's Sanskrit grammar reveals more than just a simple one affinity with thetoday's programming language. As Chandra argues, it is grammar itself that is “an algorithm, a machine that breaks down phonemes and morphemes to then compose words and sentences”. It can't be a mere coincidence. Noam Chomsky, recalling the thought of Panini, he placed the basi of the programming language through the theory of American syntax.
The path of Chandra
Chandra walks through what he defines as a Sanskrit cosmopolitan city: "an ecumene of writing and orality, which extended from Afghanistan to Java and which included dozens of kingdoms, languages and cultures". One might think that Sanskrit is part of her cultural baggage, but during and after European colonialism she had been progressively isolated. Chandra found boring il way in which the Sanskrit was taught in schools: “it reeked of hypocrisy, of religious obscurantism, of the bourgeois fixations of the Indian far right and, what's worse, of an oppression thousands of years old”. The official language was Hindi, which the writer defines as "the language of the conquerors", writing in English.
Before reaching Sanskrit, Chandra is interested in programming languages, which he carefully describes, as in a bestiary, from the rudimentary PL/1 to the trivial Visual Basic from Microsoft, up to the highly requested clown, “the fashion of the moment”, and to the “esoteric” malbolge, whose name derives, not surprisingly, from the eighth circle of Dante's Inferno.
Then he starts writing his own first novel, Red earth and pouring rain, which has for protagonist un poet. He wonders what makes a poem beautiful, and then goes back, covering cultural distances, up to the tantric texts of the first millennium and the cosmology of Abhinavagupta, To Research of a aesthetic level that coding cannot achieve.
After all, poetry and logic have very little in common. Poetry is patient, but it can go into the darkness of the immense. Also there programming it is however one powerful tool, according to Chandra, since she "acts and interacts with herself and with the world", thus also transforming our way of thinking:
We are already used to filtering our experiences through software. Facebook and Google offer us a view of the world that can be manipulated, but which can manipulate us in turn. The self-aware language of websites, applications and the net remains engraved within us.
So is it enough to understand programming to be able to say that we are cultured? Certainly not. Either way, we'd better take a little more interest in the code, because soon the code will be interested in us.
