The long refactor

In 2000, I took a high-school computer science class (“Computer Applications” was the course title) on HTML. We learned to write our code in Notepad on Windows 98, and ever since I’ve been biased toward composing everything—from web code to 5,000-word freeform explorations that mix poetry with blogging—in barebones text editors ¹.

This acquired behavior is my entire experience with coding in miniature. I didn’t become a coder per se, because I’ve never written code for money and wouldn’t consider myself proficient at it. (Please don’t hire me to code your site or application!).

But coding did refactor how I wrote, even deep in the darkest Dikaeopolis-translating magical abysses of the humanities, when I was, for instance, dealing with the technical debt of rewriting a blob of first-draft prose about Plato.

Refactoring the writing process

Indeed, my cursory time working with code in a structured academic setting profoundly affected both the form and function (pun intended) of my philosophy writing:

• Form: Composing in Notepad made me partial to shorter blocks of text chiseled out quickly. It also demystified the writing process for me: Instead of doing a whole big ritual, waiting for inspiration as the blank Word page anti-beckoned and trying to write the text to make all other text obsolete, I saw writing instead as just input (my fingers flitting, my brain bursting) for a corresponding output (ideas, emotions). I knew I had to start it, instead of thinking too much beforehand (although mentally rehearsing lines and doing calculations while away from the editor was still important). The plainness of Notepad reinforced this “act-now” mentality then, just as apps like Tot do now. When I wrote that senior thesis on Plato’s Timaeus, my methodology of writing quickly in a plain text editor let me move with a speed and an un-sentimentality ² that’d have been impossible for me, the hyper-anxious person, if forced to do it somewhere more ornate without decomposing it into little code-like chunks, into the writing equivalent of functions.
• Function: When I came to what my writing did, I thought of it as a big series of shortcuts, many of them borrowed from others a la programmers taking from Stack Overflow, rather than as an exhausting fully “original” all-out effort each time. I aimed to bring novel ideas out into the open, but nothing’s truly original ³ and basically every notion requires someone else’s notion—much as a wrapper function in programming requires another function. What if I just created a wrapper function, er, a citation to another scholar’s work, to explain this section of the Timaeus, instead of trying to rephrase it from scratch?, I asked myself at one point, remembering abstractly how in a latter computer science class, in 2003, I learned how to write basic C++ code that began with the “include <iostream.h>” library each time—a shortcut of sorts.

Coding made me a better humanities writer. Likewise, my time studying Greek and Latin in college undoubtedly helped me with understanding seemingly unrelated technical concepts. Both of those languages work very differently than English ⁴ and there’s entire new syntaxes, ways of arranging sentences, ways of thinking involved in learning them. Parsing their code within texts by authors such as Aristophanes and Menander felt familiar, like looking over my rudimentary HTML and C++ code for errors.

In these ways, expertise is non-linear. It doesn’t come solely from learning Subject A from the basest basics to most advanced advances; knowing something about tangential Subject B and also Subject C can enlighten you in ways you’d never anticipated. This is why I think liberal arts education is so valuable.

Getting creative

In those high-school CS classes, I’d learned how (some) technical people use a favored stack of tools to work toward predictable results. Plus, I’d picked up on their distinctive vocabulary (“memory leak,” “setting up your environment,” and so on) and had it written into my memory (hah!), and I eventually became comfortable enough doing things that are somewhat beyond the totally nontechnical—updating DNS records, writing TOML files, understanding what JSON does—albeit trivial for true “hackers.” ⁵

My technical affinity then led me to blogs such as Daring Fireball and to platforms like Mastodon, which is how I discovered tools such as Tot and MarsEdit, as well as languages such as Markdown ⁶. All of this expanded knowledge, in an area that wasn’t even my specialty, gave me the infrastructure to produce even creative writing that I’d have not been up to writing had I stuck to the humanities only.

I’ll leave this post with a segment I composed in a flurry within the stark simplicity of Tot, while trying to come up with ideas for a blog post about why I struggled with “separating the artist from the art.” The scratchpad ideas turned into their own thing, a perfect demonstration of how taking a utilitarian approach can yield satisfying (to me, at least) results:

When Larson and Watterston retired in 1995, I had no notion of who they were as people. I was inside a Kentucky convenience store on the day Larson gave up and bequeathed not so much as a searchable image description-laden online database of his work: Naive, I would’ve thought much later at a time that’s now mercifully long ago, what a total fool so behind the Gutenberg-praising journalism professors who think physical books are passé. There was a newspaper with The Far Side assuredly folded up inside of it, inked panels all deathly still between the mausoleums of moveable type encircling them, all their lined dogs and curved farmers just unseen, de-folded origami pressed tighter by their identical twins above and below them on the rack, and my first association with Larson’s name remains, even in this moment, no humanoid face, but a bovine figure (it’s “fun” to read that as both a French and an English word) puzzled by their spotty tools. The clerk is a lemon-colored oval in my leaking memory, not yet garbage-collected, the store itself a blue recycle bin, the newspapers composites of funny pages and stories about Oprah and offensive Snapple labels tinted the color of tea and destined to be spilled across the pencil-colored rainy sidewalks Out There.