@yaxu
While I agree with your critique to a certain extent (and I've seen you relate this a few times), I think you take the field of computer science too seriously, and wind up being just as wrong as the "computer scientists" you criticize as a matter of course. But I think there is a bisimilar misrecognition that causes your critique to actually miss the mark under *the conditions of art*, while the computer scientists you criticize err under the conditions of science.
The problem as I see it is that programming has been subordinated to the conditions of science, yet what is novel for science within programming was mostly elaborated long ago, and so most computer scientists wind up illuminating "the truths" of what has already been done and thus wind up aestheticizing theories, not unlike the illumination of manuscripts carried out for centuries by medieval monks.
But programming is not a science, its something much more generic, being a medium of general expression, communication via machines; this is a point with which I imagine you agree. But where I think where you go wrong is to deny that the writing programs is first and foremost a form of writing, and thus assume that writing programs should necessarily be a means to other ends. But all the best art, or even science, or politics or even relationships of love, is necessarily elaborated as means without ends. The most interesting art to be created as an endeavor of programming has been, and will be, in my view, beautiful in-and-for-itself, without subordination to any externally predetermined set of predicates.
Mallarme's poems aren't exceptional for their contents, but for the anomalous matter presented at the limits of the codification the Alexandrine; Milford Graves' music isnt remarkable for the records produced but rather his ultimate estrangement of the institution of meter; the same can be said of Brecht's suspension of the identification of the spectator, Audre Lorde's sublation of all existing transcendentals assumed to necessarily order the worlds of words, or Rodchenko's elaboration of photo montage to demonstrate that which defies the limits of the constructible.
And I think this is why we disagreed about debugging being interesting in the past. You see it as a means to an end, while I see it as something novel in the history of writing; the inscription of err such that it remains equally errant at any other point in space & time, while solutions are often demonstrably uncountable
plague round
blake shaw 🇵🇸