Styles and Voices

The prevailing image of the computer represents it as a logical machine and computer programming as a technical, mathematical activity. Both the popular and technical culture have constructed computation as the ultimate embodiment of the abstract and formal. Yet the computer's intellectual personality has another side: our research finds diversity in the practice of computing that is denied in action by its social construction. When we looked closely at programmers in action we saw formal and abstract approaches; but we also saw highly successful programmers in relationships with their material that are more reminiscent of a painter than a logician. They use concrete and personal approaches to knowledge that are far from the cultural stereotypes of formal mathematics. We have studied computers and the cultures that grow up around them in a wide variety of settings ranging from video game arcades to research laboratories of artificial intelligence. In this paper [1] we draw particularly on a long-term line of research on how people enter the culture of programming. Using clinical methods inspired by the Piagetian and psychoanalytic traditions, we built up case studies of children using computers in grade school settings and college students taking a first programming course. We saw many manifestations of the concrete approach, favored in our study by more women than men. [2] We were also able to observe people reacting poignantly to what they felt as a pressure to conform to an officially imposed style. Although the computer as an expressive medium supports epistemological pluralism, the computer culture often does not. Our data points to discrimination in the computer culture that is determined not by rules that keep people out but by ways of thinking that make them reluctant to join in. Moreover, the existence of diverse styles of expert programming supports the idea that there can be different but equal voices even where the formal has traditionally appeared as almost definitionally supreme: in mathematics and the sciences. The computer forces general questions about intellectual style to reveal an everyday face. Even schoolroom differences in how children program computers raise issues that come up in a more abstract form in scholarly debates about scientific objectivity. The computer makes ideas about noncanonical scientific voices more concrete and therefore appropriable because we can relate them not only to the science of the scientists but to our own thinking. Here we focus on descriptions of a concrete way of knowing; the formal, canonical style is well known and well defended. Yet, our discussion of concrete approaches is implicitly a discussion of formal ones; it contributes to the deconstruction of the canonical style as the only way to think. It also situates it: the supervaluation of the formal approach owes much of its strength within computation to the support it gets in other intellectual domains. Formal hinking, defined as synonymous with logical thinking, has been given a privileged status that can be challenged only by developing a respectful understanding of other styles, where logic is seen as a powerful instrument of thought but not as the "law of thought. " In this view, "logic is on tap not on top. " As a carrier for pluralistic ideas about approaches to knowledge, the computer may hold the promise of catalyzing change not only within the computer culture but in the culture at large.