Technology and Reality
It all begins with an idea.
What brings people to working with technology is the simplicity of the thing. It works or it does not. You don’t have to sell it anything, you don’t have to be self confident; you don’t need to smell good; you don’t have to cut your nails; you don’t have to be polite. It does not judge you. It just does what it is supposed to. We (technologists) work in languages and configurations to compile a new reality. Languages that drive the action we are accomplishing, but also drive a significant amount of customization and redefining. Michele Foucault said of language, “it [language] has become the analysis of order, language makes connections over time that have not existed before. Languages evolve through population shifts, wars, victories, fashions, exchange of goods.” Essentially arguing, in my view, that reality is formed in the mind of those using the language to describe the logistics of the day. Language informs and is reality.
We compile and configure a new way for our company to succeed to achieve its goals, to gain efficiencies where none existed. I would argue are the new poet kings of the earth. Poetry it self is meant to evoke a viceral reaction. Longing, hope, desperation, solitude, love, in many ways the code we write does this. Imagine the refugee learning how to code to feed his newly arrived family to a foreign land, would not his code inspire love? …or the analyst developing a new application to make trades faster, does he not do it for greed. These all may seem to direct, but eloquence, elegance and essence come from these compositions sometimes more than from poetry. And they are just as real or unrelatable or ephemeral as poetry.
On the other side Nietzsche says of the essence of things “We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing.” Arguing that language is just a pointer. That (pointing at a rock) thing is a rock, not capturing the nature of the thing. Its formation, its texture, its composition are still a mystery. Yet, as we define the operations, fields, functions, if-then, xor, and algorithms we are closer to the essence of what we are creating than language can get us close to understanding if the rock is composed of silicon, iron, calcium or carbon. From this perspective we can say that the prose we code leaves us closer to the things we are manipulating as we have to at its very core understand the essence of the code we are writing so that it works correctly.