Vikram Chandra -- Geek sublime: the beauty of code and the code of beauty
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There are at least two aspects to Chandra's book: the parts that
apply to modern computer programming and coding and the parts that
apply principles of Indian philosophy and poetry to coding.

Disclaimer: I'm a programmer.  I've written code for computers for
many years using a variety of programming languages and running on a
variety of machines and software environments.  So, I'm reading and
viewing some of what is in "Geek sublime" from a special point of
view.  Because I spend a good part of my time reading and trying to
understand code and trying to make fixes to it, I care more about
whether code is understandable and modifiable than I do about some
notion of elegance or on aesthetic qualities based on an external
standard or guide.  It may also be significant that I program in
high level, interpreted languages, mostly Python
(https://www.python.org/), but also a bit in Ruby
(https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/) and Erlang (http://www.erlang.org/).
These are languages whose design places emphasis on code that is
clean, readable, and easy to debug code over, for example, execution
speed or memory usage.  I much prefer Python, Ruby, and Erlang over
low level, cryptic languages like C and C++, which make reading code
and finding and fixing errors so much more difficult.

Having said that, code that has the the qualities of elegance and
aesthetics that Chandra discusses, likely will trend toward readable
and modifiable code.  However, I say shoot for code that is readable
and modifiable and the aesthetics will follow, rather than aiming
for the aesthetic qualities and hoping that the readability and
maintainability follow from that.

An interesting section is where Chandra discusses some differences
between qualities of art and those of code.  I believe he may be
focusing on two points: (1) all art is not aesthetic in the sense of
being beautiful; and (2) art breaks rules, for example, good writers
of fiction (and good orators, too) sometimes break the rules of
grammar.  If we are to use art or aesthetics as a guide to producing
*good* code, then we will likely want to slide over those
differences.  We will want to write code that is elegant, pleasing,
even beautiful in some sense.  And, because our language processor
or compiler (whether C, C++, Python, Ruby, ...) will not accept code
that breaks grammar rules (and other rules besides.  This second
aspect is not a defect in the language processors; we (computer
programmers) *want* that processor or compiler to warn us about
mistakes in our code.  In fact, the language I use most often,
Python, does rather loose compile time error checking, and so I
often run a style/error checking program against my code (that code
checker is called flake8).

The title of the book is a little misleading, for me at least.
"Geek sublime" suggests that this book is aimed only, or mostly at
techies and computer programmers.  It does address issues of
computer programming, and does attempt to employ aesthetic, poetic,
and philosophical ideas to help us improve the computer programs we
write.  But, much of the book seems addressed to writers of fiction,
which after all, is what occupies a good portion of Chandra's life.
So, the range of readers to whom this book might be interesting is
likely to be larger that the title suggests.

And, then there a dose of futurism toward the end of "Geek sublime".
And, we fade off with a bit of mysticism at the very end, or perhaps
it's romanticism.  It's an interesting book, but I feel like I'd
have to enter some alternative mental state in order to appreciate
it.  Perhaps, in the future, I'll revisit "Geek sublime"; I'll have
changed; and additional parts of the book will be meaningful for me.
In the meantime, it's entertaining, but only scattered sections are
practical and usable by me.  But, then, it's likely that
practicality is not the right frame of reference through which to
view this book.

11/24/2014

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