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Geek sublime : the beauty of code, the code of beauty
Chandra V., Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2014. 272 pp. Type: Book (978-1-555976-85-9)
Date Reviewed: Dec 2 2014

Vikram Chandra’s compact Geek sublime opens with a code snippet in C# to output “Hello World”--the very familiar traditional first program--and ends with a deep observation about writing fiction. Sandwiched between these two seemingly unrelated ideas is a gamut of information and variegated topics.

Being both a programmer and a writer, Chandra is in a unique position to explore the two worlds for their similarities and differences. He opens by examining some of the many aesthetic interpretations applied to programming, including Paul Graham’s essay “Hackers and Painters” [1] and Donald Knuth’s literate programming.

What follows is a review of his own experiences as a programmer and a writer, and a patient, gentle introduction to logic gates, one of the fundamental pieces in the mechanics of computing. A mention of the all-male culture in information technology (IT) is inescapable, and Chandra offers an entertaining description of the various stereotypes that abound in the industry. From my days of studying the history of computing, I remembered that Ada Lovelace was often described as the world’s first computer programmer. My memories of ENIAC, however, are incomplete; ENIAC’s “programmers” were women. Having reminded readers of this, Chandra describes the “masculinization” of the industry, before finding a parallel in the gender politics of the British Raj.

Chandra finds Graham’s analogy incomplete and attempts to find more fitting interpretations of art and beauty. He does so by exploring Indian history and the aethestics of Indian art.

This exploration comes as a complete surprise after a few initial chapters that build upon one another. In a radical departure from all matters of programming, Chandra devotes pages to the Sanskrit language and the influence of Panini’s Ashtadhyayi on linguistics in general (and computer languages in particular). He examines the ideas of beauty and pleasure through the rasa-dhvani theory and tantric systems. These chapters are rich in references, quoted material, and terminology, making them at once harder and engaging.

As he closes, Chandra presents the ominous case for the foreseeable future where, thanks to the digital age of the present with the preponderance of social media and our reliance on electronic devices powered by code, code could also enter the real world. The questions of art and the experience of art would rise in a new light, requiring thinkers like those introduced in this book to come up with answers.

The ten chapters work well as a set of essays, some of which bear an informal tone while others read like dry academic texts laced with references, quoted material, and the vocabulary of the humanities. Some connections across the essays are obvious; others are left to the reader to discover (or, to take a leaf from a chapter, to “savor”).

To his credit, Chandra bravely tries to keep this seemingly wild exploration of ideas reasonably cohesive. Overall, however, he does not quite manage to lucidly mix the writings on technology and the writings on aesthetics. At one point, he effects what seems like a surreal flourish out of a Buñuel film by adroitly transitioning from an exploration of beauty in terms of Indian aesthetics to talking about beauty in code. At other points, the transition is too abrupt. It is hard to shake off the impression that one is reading a set of sketches (much like the style Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. chose for some of his books). The section on logic gates flows well, and the section dedicated to Sanskrit is the strongest. Some of the rest often suffer from an imbalance between quoted and original material. Other parts contain ideas that would fare well in an essay devoted to them, a case in point being the history of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the Indian side of IT (the Indian geek, the misunderstood cultural idiom, the Indian Mafia in Silicon Valley, and the rising percentage of women in IT in India).

With its mixed writing style and ambitious coverage of ideas, this is not an easy book to read. It is, however, in the spirit of its text, a piece of art that invites you to experience the disparate ideas within it and build your own connections among them.

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Reviewer:  George Thomas Review #: CR142976 (1503-0202)
1) Graham, P. Hackers & painters: big ideas from the computer age. O’Reilly, Sebastopol, CA, 2004.
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General (D.1.0 )
 
 
C# (D.3.2 ... )
 
 
Code Generation (D.3.4 ... )
 
 
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