The Software Arts (Software Studies)

About this book

An alternative history of software that places the liberal arts at the very center of softwares evolution. In The Software Arts Warren Sack offers an alternative history of computing that places the arts at the very center of softwares evolution. Tracing the origins of software to eighteenth-century French encyclopedists step-by-step descriptions of how things were made in the workshops of artists and artisans Sack shows that programming languages are the offspring of an effort to describe the mechanical arts in the language of the liberal arts. Sack offers a reading of the texts of computingcode algorithms and technical papersthat emphasizes continuity between prose and programs. He translates concepts and categories from the liberal and mechanical artsincluding logic rhetoric grammar learning algorithm language and simulationinto terms of computer science and then considers their further translation into popular culture where they circulate as forms of digital life. He considers among other topics the arithmetization of knowledge that presaged digitization; todays multitude of logics; the history of demonstration from deduction to newer forms of persuasion; and the post-Chomsky absence of meaning in grammar. With The Software Arts Sack invites artists and humanists to see how their ideas are at the root of software and invites computer scientists to envision themselves as artists and humanists.