Creationism in Computer Programming with François-René Rideau
Details
Abstract:
The lives we live are woven around the stories we tell.
This is true of programmers as of all humans.
Now the greatest of all stories are origin stories.
In a first part, I will examine the origin stories of software,
from simple tales of software creation
to elaborate theories of software evolution.
As I do, I will relate these stories to the tools they explain
and the technological realities we bring about by following them.
In a second part, I will conclude by reflecting on storytelling,
on the progression of the above stories, and on what lies beyond.
Stories are fun! And they subtly inform us. Let me tell you a good story…
NB: Various versions of this work have been presented at ENS (2005),
MSLUG (2009), LispNYC (2014), and Salon des Refusés (2017).
https://github.com/fare/fci2017
Bio:
Faré is a cybernetician specialized in software growth infrastructure and currently living in NYC. You can hire his consulting services.
He is known as a Common Lisper for promoting Lisp as a scripting language (http://fare.livejournal.com/184127.html), and having developed the build system ASDF3 (https://github.com/fare/asdf3-2013/) and the Lisp Interface Library (https://github.com/fare/lil-ilc2012) combining ad hoc and parametric polymorphism.
Faré likes to think in terms of computing interactions and programming processes rather than computer devices and software artifacts. He once led the TUNES Project to reinvent computing (http://tunes.org/) and recently started a new blog on this topic, Houyhnhnm Computing (https://ngnghm.github.io/). He relatedly believes in the power of
storytelling and of evolutionism (http://github.com/fare/evo2017).