Scotland Ruby 2011 - Literary Criticism for the Idle Programmer
Channel: Confreaks
Date: 2015-05-19

by: Roland Swingler

We think about the software we build as _doing_ things, test it to ensure it does the right thing, and hope we can easily change what it does. We forget that we _write_ software; that we read code, our own and that of others; that our software is as much a written text as a working artifact. Literary critics read for a living - maybe as programmers we can learn something from them, both how to be a good reader and how to think as we conjure up code at our keyboards.

If you've ever wondered what style is, or why Domain Driven Design is like Madame Bovary, or how to write code that writes itself; if you're curious as to what a literary critic actually does all day, or how complicated you can make 'Hello World', or why you would care about a novel that doesn't use the letter 'E'; in short - if you want to know the answer to the burning question: "Can code be art?" then this is the talk for you.