In Which A Lengthy Passage is Quoted; Feathers are Ruffled, Without Recourse Given to Smoothing; The Text is Endlessly Self-Referential; And In Which the Conventions of Victorian Literature are Cruelly Mockèd Via the Title
“The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be. ... The computer resembles the magic of legend in this respect, too. If one character, one pause, of the incantation is not strictly in proper form, the magic doesn't work.” – F. Brooks
I will now make a controversial assertion. Ready?
“Computer science, as a major, requires the most writing of any save English.”
Why is this?
As the quotation above supports, computer science in its most applied form (i.e. programming) demands a degree of exactitude in language that is simply without parallel. Therefore, educating prospective computer scientists requires sheer bloody-mindedness on the part of the professor – when a misplaced parenthesis dooms a program, your students cannot afford to have anything less than dozens and dozens of hours of practice. They need to intuit how to do it right, because debugging out these trivial errors is very costly for limited return. Get it right the first time, so your boss will be happy with you and there’s money left in the budget for a nice bonus for the whole team (perchance to dream).
There’s a school of thought that I have encountered once or twice that alleges that coding doesn’t “count” as writing because it’s not “real” language people use to communicate with each other.
I shall politely term this argument utter piffle.
Anyone who speaks with computer scientists for any length of time will note that we have a combination of stylistic elements peculiar to our profession. More often than not, computer scientists speak precisely – or, conversely, make specific use of ambiguity to accentuate their point – and have no fear of convoluted grammatical structures that drive their dear readers into fits of gibbering madness. These likely stem from the aforementioned need to use precisely the right function call and the endless practice in navigating complex code, respectively. The frequent injection of parenthetical statements or asides is another indicator of a computer scientist (deriving from the programmer’s drive to comment out their code). While I cannot reproduce for you, dear reader, the countless conversations I’ve had with others of my kind that drove me to this conclusion, I would submit for your consideration that I, and by extrapolation this very blog entry, am a prime example of everything I discuss.
Now, dear reader, I pose the following question to you: if an individual engages in an activity consisting of putting words together in a syntactical arrangement, with such activity contributing to the development of his (or, I suppose, her, though the percentage of female computer scientists is woefully small) voice in more “conventional” communication, is that not writing?
Granted, there is other writing within students’ experience of computer science, such as formal mathematical proof and code documentation. However, I’d argue (using my friends as pawn… I mean, examples) that coding is that specific activity which contributes so heavily to the development of our unique voice, with proof being shared with mathematicians (of whom I have admittedly not met many, so I cannot speak authoritatively on how different their style is from ours) and documentation being a subordinate activity to the larger process of programming.
Ours is not a mere continuation of mathematics by other means. It’s writing as surely as this blog entry is, and deserves recognition as such.
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