I just finished reading one of the most interesting articlesI’ve read in months. In fact it’s one of the finest pieces of writing of any kind that I’ve read this year. My hat is off to Annie Lowrey at Slate Magazine for her work. Take a few moments and read the story. It’s a bit longish, but well worth your time, especially if you are not a computer programmer, but use computers all the time.
Lowrey tells the story of a famous programmer named “Why the Lucky Stiff,” or “_why” for short, who disappeared from the programming community suddenly and without explanation. _why was a mythic figure – the prophetic muse for thousands of Ruby and Ruby on Rails programmers in the start-up subculture. He was an iconic programmer, artist, and philosopher, and one of the most important voices to the people who invented, innovated, created, built, and got rich off of much of what you do on your computer.
Then he suddenly disappeared.
Chances are you know nothing about computer programming. You probably know even less about the “start-up” community. You will probably not have even heard of _why – I hadn’t. Nevertheless you need to read this story. It’s a great story, and well told. But there’s a deeper reason.
It helps peel back the curtains of how language works, and the way it is so integrally woven into the life of a community. This story can single-handedly debunk a lot of the logical positivistic interpretation of scripture found among North American Christian fundamentalists. What language does, how it works, where it came from, how it functions… it’s all there in this story. The reasons why we are a storied people and how our language integrates with our being, our lives, are running in the background of this story of Why the Lucky Stiff.
It’s also a story about the power of language and knowledge. As computers continue to dominate more of our lives, consciously or unconsciously we are giving more and more power to the ones who know how to speak, write, create, and control through computer language. We give them power in our culture. We do this uncritically and en masse.
What this story taught me is that I think there is an analogy to be made concerning language, story, and the way we interact with language as a community, and what this milieu does to a community (and to the language itself). Computer language is a phenomenal way to try and understand all language. It is created on purpose over a very short span of time. Yet it functions like a traditional language. Philosophical and Linguistic study of computer language would be a phenomenal PhD project for someone out there.
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