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Texts
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Copyleft and Right
When a public gallery announces that it has been bequeathed the works of a recently deceased artist, the tone is always one of gratitude and praise for the artist’s generosity. Museums and universities accept the papers of retired statesmen and writers with equal gratitude. Such donations, I’m sure, are transacted across several meetings and much legal negotiation. But surely these... -
Squibs
The ostensible intention of these notes is to create a transparent continuity between the notes I gather from day to day and “finished” texts. There is also something comforting about the idea that all my notes, which I gather readily as I go about my day, will almost automatically—like drops of mercury on a flat surface—gather themselves into finished texts. Obviously, the... -
Procrastination
In 1962, Donald Knuth accepted a commission to write a book about compiler design. When he began to tackle his subject he realised that before he could write his book, a deeper analysis of the basic concepts of computer programming was required. He started writing what soon became a twelve volume book. Each volume was initially conceived as a chapter until he realised that he had miscalculated... -
Here comes the science bit
On this site, I try to emphasise a continuity between text and code. Does code really need to look different from other text? Do we really need to see the line numbers and colourisation, the indentation? Do we need to see it in a mono-spaced font against a black background? It is useful to have this apparatus while editing a script. The indentation clarifies logical branching. Colourisation is...
Citations
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Compared to other contemporary programming languages, Ruby does sometimes look old-fashioned. But it’s important to keep in mind that “never be too innovative” is also a key to creating beautiful code.”
Yukihiro Matsumoto in Beatiful Code p. 480 -
But now I leave my Cetological System standing thus unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may be finished by their...
Melville: Moby-Dick p. 32