Monomorphic

Works of art, including film, painting, sculpture, literature and poetry, have a seemingly inexhaustible quality. As we keep confronting them, renewing our relationship with them over time, we continually extract more meaning from them. Some works truly appear to be bottomless. Reaching the bottom easily is, of course, a sure sign that a work will not have much lasting value.

Out of the forms listed above, (written) poetry and literature have the particular property that they are crafted out of a demonstrably finite medium: text. A finite alphabet, finite vocabulary, and a finite number of pages. As long as one disregards the effect of details such as paper quality, typography and binding, perfect copies can be made; the text can indeed be transcribed in its entirety without information loss. Somehow, reading Goethe on a Kindle is an experience that still holds power, although he presumably never intended his books to be read on Kindles (and some might argue that reading him in this way is ignoble).

How is it then that the evocative power of something finite can seem to be boundless? This curious property is something we might call the poetic or metaphorical qualities of a text. (Works of film, painting, sculpture and so on most likely also have this power, but it is trickier to demonstrate that they are grounded in a finite medium.) Through this mysterious evocative power, the elements that make up a work of art allow us to enter into an infinity that has been enclosed in a finite space. It will be argued that what is evoked comes as much from the reader as from the text, but this duality applies to all sensation.

With this in mind we turn, once again, to programming and formal “languages”. Terms in programming languages receive their meaning through a formal semantics that describes, mathematically, how the language is to be translated into an underlying, simpler language. This process takes place on a number of levels, and eventually the lowest underlying language is machinery. This grounds the power of a program to command electrons. But this is something different from the meaning of words in a natural language. The evocative power described above is clearly absent, and computer programs today do not transcend their essential finitude. With brute force, we could train ourselves to read source code metaphorically or poetically, but in most languages I know, this would result in strained, awkward and limited metaphors. (Perhaps mostly because programming languages to a large extent reference a world different from the human world.)

Consider how this inability to transcend finitude impacts our ability to model a domain in a given programming language. With an already formal domain, such as finance or classical mechanics, it is simple since what needs to happen is a mere translation. On the other hand, other domains, such as biology, resist formalisation  – and perhaps this is one of their essential properties. Here we would like to draw on the evocative, poetic, and metaphorical capacities of natural language – for the sake of program comprehension and perhaps also to support effective user interfaces – while also writing practical programs. But we have yet to invent a formal language that is both practical and evocative to the point that works of art could be created in it.

an ancient pond / a frog jumps in / the splash of water

(Bashou, 1686)