If I’m stuck for how to start an utterance I often turn to the Oxford English Dictionary and start from a definition, which often puts me on less sure footing than when I started, but productively so, because we in the humanities like nuanced, complex definitions and are fully willing to let them shift and evolve as we encounter and construct new information. In the world of computer sciences, this is not at all the case. Definitions are agreed upon and clear. In the world of coding, I learned, we can make anything equal anything, so long as what was presented and what was equalled makes sense in the language of the code. What gets outputted might not make any sense — though I was thoroughly amused by the Python tutorials’ references to Monty Python — but it makes something (provided all the quotations, capital letters, and other marks are performed in the right syntax) in that the program can be saved and executed.

Trying to learn Python reminded me of learning the appropriate accents and diacritical marks when I was learning ancient Greek last year. I understood the concept of them, and I even understood the rules for their implementation and why they needed to show up in a particular syllable or why one mark would change into another (in Attic Greek accents will change in different conjugations of a word, depending on the length of the vowel sound and the number of syllables, among other variables). Similarly, I feel I have a base-line literacy when it comes to reading code (at least simple code). I can fairly quickly get a sense about what operation is doing what, and have a sense of why the syntax is in what order. When it came to executing those accent marks though, just like in executing lines of code in Python, I produced all kinds of errors. I’d read the instructions, understand the function of the variable and the rule, and would then have trouble getting it exact enough. Part of this is my own writerly style — things I would naturally want to capitalize in the sentence-level are not capitalized (like print), or some flourish I’d want to write into whatever text I’d produce wouldn’t work because symbols I’d use are (like parentheticals, which I obviously like and use a lot of).

What am I trying to say here — possibly that if as Mateas and others have emphasized that programming is an expressive medium, then I like that idea conceptually but at what point of comfort with programming do I get to express beyond execution? It feels like with other forms of writing, expression can happen immediately. With coding, I’m not so sure. And I’m not necessarily speaking from the expressivists paradigm necessarily, this is not about my autonomous “voice” emerging through the code, it’s about (perhaps) a version of machine-woman symbiosis I just haven’t reached yet.