In coding, nothing in your blank world exists until you name it. People often times forget that computers didn't spring from a void --I'm reminded of the Bjork song "Modern Things" in which she chirps
"All the modern things have always existed...and even though the people who imagined computers and created them can often times think in vastly abstract ways, the resulting paradigm in coding is ultimately a human way of thinking. The computer can never be told to do anything that isn't named and defined, from simply typing the letter E all the way down to bitwise operations in the logical core. This is the only way anything is stored and retrieved, by name. As users we may never be privy to these names (try looking in your temp folder sometime and see what names files have been given), but they're there nonetheless, referring to blocks of bits. Likewise, if I were to find a new orchid, it would need a name and a specific scientific description for anyone to ever be able to refer to it and check their own orchids against it.
They've just been waiting in a mountain
For the right moment
Listening to the irritating noises
Of dinosaurs and people"--
To name something in a program is to invoke its existence. I have often wondered at the arrogance shown in some programmers, namely the ones who invoke God or refer to some higher power when coding (like Nico calling his Ornia share "Godsbrain"), and as I thought about this process of calling into being and defining, this attitude made sense, even if I don't agree with it. Programmers love naming things. It's their world and they can populate it as they see fit, within the constraints of the language of course. I myself love naming pieces of equipment, and it's still a pleasure to see the name of my computer sitting right next to mine when I try to do something through the command line. One day I'll have a snazzily named wifi router, and it will be a pleasure to connect to it and see its name come up in a list of hotspots.
Once a name has been called, a tiny block of memory is set aside in the computer, waiting for something to be entered into it. Now that name can have anything ascribed to it-- colors or shapes or strings or math operations, pieces of poetry or a little creature, granted you know how to describe it properly. Here we come to the hard part, because as your sentences fall flat in your novel or your lines in your painting annoy you to no end, so you are unable to articulate clearly enough in the right terms what you want. Your creature is not bouncy enough, or glitches terribly, your generative poetry is born doggerel. And so you grow frustrated, and eventually you nix it altogether. No references for that name exist anymore, and where once the name was invoked with so much potential, it is now deallocated, and overwritten.
*called an Integrated Development Environment. However, one can write code in a text editor, if so inclined (I'm not)
3 comments:
I love that Bjork song.
It also seems to me that even the names we overwrite, once cast back into the void, often re-emerge in different forms, which is one of the most enjoyable things about the creative process. I had this line of poetry I thought of a long time ago and didn't know what to do with -- granted, it might not have been a very good line -- but a couple of days ago it resurfaced and became the start of a poem. Dreams are similar, I think, in that things from our waking lives code themselves into our dreams, in codes our conscious minds don't know how to read, and create whole words apparently without the input of the part of the self we'd normally identify as the creator.
Anyway, blah f--king blah. But, re: God, I learned from Alberto Manguel the other day that, according to Jewish tradition, it was the alphabet that God created before anything else. The letters of the alphabet then begged God to let them go off on their own and make things, so S/He/whatever did, and the alphabet made the earth and the heavens, and only then, with the power of language, could the universe be written (literally) into the binary of dark and light. Hmm...
One of my favorite Yiddish stories is of the dying of the Yiddish (Hebrew) alphabet. A demon who for centuries lived off of the wicked and tricksy things he could do with language is trapped in a mouldering book in an attic on the tiniest Hebrew letter (the vowel A I think, which is just a dot) lamenting the destruction of his language without which he cannot exist.
Ohhh, I like that. I wonder where the attic is...?
This story must have seeped pretty deeply into my brain because I had a dream the other night I was fighting my way out of the binding of an encyclopedia of dead magicians. Being trapped in a book is not pleasant.
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