Jason H. Davis

=== This post is a few days in the works. I want to thank Maddie for helping me edit it. -Jason ===

I never wanted to be a computer programer when I grew up because I didn’t want to look at text all day. There are many fallacies in this statement, one being lots professions occupy their day by looking at and writing text. I’m now majoring in a field who’s practitioners spend the majority of their day writing.

“Text is boring,” my childish mind thought; my still growing mind does not disregard this belief, but it has filled in some holes. The thoughtful and elegant flow of text across a page is what a writer strives for, lives for. Text is the medium through which he conveys a message. The medium and the message intertwine, mingle, weave into an amalgamation of thought and purpose. Clarity and poise. The text becomes more than ink on paper. More than letters on a screen. It begins to take on its own life. If the etchings of letters are boring, then it is the writer’s goal to bring those scratches of ink to life.

The writer produces a book. A leather bound compendium through which he conveys his thoughts. Ideas. Characters. Worlds. The programer has similar goals. Creating tools. Contributing ideas. Coding Artificial Intelligence. Building worlds.

Seven million people play World of Warcraft. They log in to a digital manifestation of a production team’s vision, a world filled with dynamic and static characters, a world of epic battles and struggles, but it is a world that is not written. It’s coded. Is the world of night elves and trolls less valuable than the tales of Gulliver’s Travels? The blurring of the art of the word and the art of code becomes apparent.

Beautiful code.

Blocks of code are organized into functions; this block defines the font size and typeface for the site’s content; this block allows the artificial intelligence to comprehend fuzzy logic; this block determines how the sky will render during a storm; this block defines the properties of an oak tree, a digital oak tree.

“I think that I should never see
a script as lovely as a digital tree”

One section of code flows into the next. Sometimes it explains itself. Sometimes programmers leave notes for others or for themselves when they look back. Notes to the future. Modern coding software colors functions, variables, and values helping bring structure to the fragments. What’s left is a mash-up of structured color. Organized blocks with colors easily pointing out a specific part in a line of code. Any coder conscious of his creation begins laying out his fragments with structure, order, clarity, poise. The code becomes the interpretation of its author’s thoughts and purpose.

There’s beauty in the code. Structure, order, repetition, color, and flow. Two programers can read, understand, and appreciate each other’s code, but there’s more than just the fragments of text and commands on a screen. The script is run and it becomes something else. It transforms. Just as the reader of a novel is transported to another world, the user gets transported to a website, or a productivity suite, or a virtual reality.

This is code I wrote for the photo section. This isn’t all of it, but it took over a week to figure it out =/

The true beauty of the code is its product. The visceral experience it creates for the user. What draws a person into a video game? What makes someone spend hours on a website? If Facebook makes you reflect on the structure of your social network, are you not thinking about the nature of humanity? Is that not an artist’s commentary?

What’s remarkable is that code does not replace the written word; it is a new art form. It is a new medium that supplements and enhances the other. Further, just as the invention of the written word created new possibilities for art, communication, and commerce, code has done the same. We can now contribute and share unabated. The world is becoming smaller and smaller while the sum of human knowledge grows.

There are still so many questions.

Is the world becoming more known? Or is the individual becoming lost in a sea of unfathomable information quantity? We swim in emails, blog posts, and wikipedia entries. The social internet lets us all add to the mess. We begin to see ourselves drowning in an ocean of text brought to you by a world of code.

The individual impressions of letters on a screen might be boring, but the fragments strung together so artfully is driving the most exciting and frightening time in human history. Code is the new alphabet. The internet is the new Gutenberg press.

But I still don’t want to be a computer programer.