Palindrome: Traversing Fields for Planting.

Language

William looked at Ana, as she sat next to him, drawing. She had made a game of imagining an unplanted field under a sky of rivers. William's description of Nazariy's book was incomplete. But it was enough to inspire him to move forward with his work.

The fields outside of William's house were small rectangles of unplanted land. Winter had just ended. William usually planted only enough to provide for himself and to continue his father's exploration of simple machines and growing. There was something gratifying about spending time in his fields; to feel the connection of his body to the land, to not feel the strain of lethargy which seemed to come over him at times when he worked generating algorithms. But at the same time, there were moments in programming, when the abstractions of symbols yielded and allowed him to take another step and a form emerged; the program branching out, adding to the rhizome. It was this sense of collaboration within an abstraction that attracted him to programming in the first place. It allowed him to build by finding a place where symbols, like gatekeepers, gave up their resistance.

In computer language, symbols are chosen and rules created through the consensus of a handful of people. Lesser programmers ignored this fundamental truth. They merely saw the symbols and rules as a challenge to overcome on the road to becoming a master of the language. They desired to show others their proficiency; it was a means to gain respect and increase prestige. But this practice was silly in William's eyes. As everyone who approached programming this way ended up donating their life's work to repetition; to the re-creation of widgets that quickly grew extinct, because of the need to monetize the presence of any language a machine used.

William thought of Glagolitsa, a language in the 9th century. He liked this story because the monetization and limited life of any computer language was no different than the colonization of this language created by two monks who desired to carry the text of the Bible to Slavic regions; areas that had not yet adopted a written language. And Glagolitsa had another similarity to computer language; its symbols, like those of binary, were made from abstracted forms of ones and zeros.

William's father made a point of telling him that Glagolitsa had both successes and failures. But at one point the King of Germany became fearful that the language might dominate a large section of the population undermining his influence so had one of the monks imprisoned. A political battle ensued between the church in Rome and the government in Germany about Glagolitsa. Arguments continued about establishing control over people and territories through language. Eventually Glagolitsa disappeared having lost the battle and was replaced by a language based on the Cyrillic alphabet. It established an economy and served the political powers that benefited from its use.

Vernacular languages, like the languages of machines had a shelf-life. William knew he should never forget this. And when he chose to program, he did so without a commitment to the specific symbols or their syntax. Instead he learned to develop a flexibility—a facility to structure any algorithm in any language on a set of patterns of behavior. This was the more human approach. It was less machine.