Escaping the prison of style

Abstract

We seek support for our notion of authorially open programming practices through a critical reading of the notion of "style" in our dominant programming cultures. We argue that this popular notion of programming style is inescapably infused with values which diverge from those of its supposed analogues in areas such as literary and artistic expression. By examining the discourse around and technical distinctions between programming styles, we reveal their fundamentally different nature in structuring dialogues between the writers of computational artefacts and those who experience them. Programming styles are predominantly discussed in inward-facing terms, i.e. with regard only to the experience of programmers with privileged access to the source code. Regardless of their chosen style, programs consist of "imprisoned expressions", built of design elements cut off from access to the program which executes in the world. We construct a miniature integration language, still bounded within the space of existing programming language styles, to solve an open authorship problem, and observe that the increased open ownership of expressions has come at a significant usability cost. We fail to escape the prison, and reflect that our own dialogue remains predominantly inward-facing, due to the lack of proper materials and vocabulary to put communities into correspondence. We look forward to more convivial venues and idioms for expressing computational artefacts, with more equal relationships between the ecologies of construction and ecologies of use.