Spoiled, showoff-y, convinced of their own supremacy: It’s easy to hate software engineers. Or so says Sheon Han in a recent essay for WIRED, and I believe him. Not only is Sheon a programmer himself—he can also write. These are, I think, the most trustworthy people. Not writers; never writers. I mean specialists who happen to be good at writing. The great critic Cynthia Ozick was once asked who should write her biography. She replied: “a gastroenterologist in possession of literary skills.” This is exactly right.
And it’s one of the reasons that, earlier this year, I launched a new series at WIRED called Machine Readable (to which Sheon regularly contributes). I wanted a place to publish—if not gastroenterologists—programmers in possession of literary skills. The fact is, for all its dependence on code, the internet produces almost no literate, to say nothing of literary, writing about it. And us layfolk, who perhaps don’t know our Java from our JavaScript, our C from our C++, need to get with the literal program. As the tagline for Machine Readable goes: “If/when the machines take over, we should at least speak their language.”
Nice and friendly, isn’t it? If Pascal’s wager was something like “Believe in God just in case,” my wager is more like “Respect computers just in case.” So I don’t kick robots. I try not to yell at Alexa. I say please and thank you to ChatGPT. Now I publish respectful, respectable writing about programming languages. Clive Thompson on BASIC. Scott Gilbertson on Python. Sheon on Haskell. Turns out there’s a big audience for it—people like me who want to hear from the master human-machine translators of our time. Software engineers might be easy to hate, but those of them who can also write nice sentences? They might very well be our salvation.
.jpg "A marble squirrel sculpture in a garden")
.jpg "Image may contain: Book, Publication, Clothing, Glove, Computer Hardware, Electronics, Hardware, Monitor, and Screen")
