Literature and Programming

Tor had a recent post up about SF stories which capture programming experience.

For all that it touches on some works which capture elements of the experience of programming - a lot of it is about things like dealing with management - and has some clear hits (Vinge, predictably, is there) while missing others (Moran is not), I'm not sure that it asked the most interesting question.

Knuth, in discussing what doing software development is like, zoomed in on one thing: the ability to think of something you are doing on multiple scales at once, from the very immediate (compare-variable-to-zero here) all the way up to the highest level, taking into consideration structural and efficiency concerns at the same time.

There's a literary model which reflects that: the kind where every word is critical, attention to detail and to overall structure is equally important, where subtle precisions call for continual attention (and more attention in writing than reading, but still considerable attention in reading).

Some of this is poetry -

And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph.

- though many, probably most poets, do not display this attention to detail (Virgil, Dante, Milton, Eliot, Pound, Pope, Bunting do) . But some are novels, the most obvious being Ulysses, though such novels may tend towards the spare rather than the elaborate: John M. Ford's work is arguably in this space.

Oddly, much fiction written by programmers - Plauger, Vinge, Moran, Cook, Stross - does not have this type of structure, although they often have direct references to, or jokes based on, the culture associated with programming. Many of these authors fall into the "competent prose, neat ideas" set of fictional works.