Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 40, No. 60.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
                      Hosted by DH-Cologne
                       www.dhhumanist.org
                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org




        Date: 2026-06-18 09:30:50+00:00
        From: Tim Smithers <tim.smithers@cantab.net>
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 40.52: the craft of programming

Dear Willard,

After pointing us to Paul Taylor's nice "Ask Claude," London
Review of Books, 48.8 (7 May 2026), you asked ...

    "Who now writes code in this way?"

I do.

I often use computation to get done things I need to do or
want to do.  And, much as Paul Taylor does, I would describe
this programming as crafting.  It's never just working on
writing correct lines of code.  It's always a way to think
about what I want to do, debug my thinking on this, better
understand what I'm trying to do, and how, and a way to
discover how else it can be done, and, sometimes, discover
what else I could better be doing, and perhaps should be doing
instead.

I program in Logo for just about everything I use computation
to do.  [So, no using Generative AI systems to pretend I'm
programming!]

Logo is an old AI programming language designed and
implemented by Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert, and Cynthia
Solomon in 1967.  It's a general purpose list processing
language, like Lisp, but with a nicer sensible syntax.  It's
perhaps better known for it's Turtle Graphics functions, which
I use lots to make graphs, diagrams, and visualisations, and
to make computational drawings and paintings, some of which
form part of an investigation of [what I call] the looking to
seeing process: what happens from some looking which casts
light patterns on our retinas to any seeing that then happens,
usually so fast we don't notice this process happening, and
which typically results in a naming what we look at, that is,
it results in some languaging, not just a "visual perception,"
whatever that is.  [So, how do animals which don't language
see?]

Logo being an AI programming language means, amongst other
things, there's no distinction between code and data, and
this, with the basic list processing, makes it good to build
code which writes code, and then run this code.  So, building
self-modifying programmes, so called, is quite doable ...  but
horrible to debug.  [Self-modifying code is a compact way of
building generative systems, which I use a lot.]  This also
makes Logo good for building programs which build code in
other programming languages too, to do other computational
things, such as make Super Collider code to make sound with,
which I do in a design research project I work on.

The name Logo comes form the Greek logos meaning, I think,
'word' and/or 'thought,' but there are likely others here who
can correct or enlighten me on this.

And, surely there are others here who craft code too.  No?

-- Tim




> On 12 Jun 2026, at 07:15, Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:
>
>
>              Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 40, No. 52.
>        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
>                      Hosted by DH-Cologne
>                       www.dhhumanist.org
>                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
>        Date: 2026-06-11 08:58:17+00:00
>        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
>        Subject: programming
>
> On what has happened and is happening to the craft of programming, see
> Paul Taylor, "Ask Claude", London Review of Books 48.8 (7 May 2026).
>
> Those here who zero in on 'craft' will think of the crafts more generally as
> as result of the Industrial Revolution and then, post-WWII, automation. Is it
> to romanticise to think of the crafts transformed from industry by hand to
> a vocation, to the question of what handcrafting is for? One can say this is
> only for the rich-in-pocket. I say, it is for the enrichment in mind.
>
> Who now writes code in this way?
>
> Comments?
>
> WM
> --
> Willard McCarty, Professor em., King's College London;
> Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts, Sciences and Humanities
> (tinyurl.com/Berghahn-IRASH); Humanist (dhhumanist.org);
> Science in the Forest, Science in the Past
> (www.cl.cam.ac.uk/events/sfsp/);
> www.mccarty.org.uk



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