Douglas Rushkoff and I could go rounds on his argument in this little treatise. Mostly, I take offense to the last chapter of our required reading—X Purpose. In this chapter Rushkoff attempts to parlay his thesis down the reader’s mouth by forwarding the conclusion that you must learn programming or you will become the ‘program’—what I believe he is saying here is in fact that you merge with the program and are not the creator but the created: think of Facebook. We did not create Facebook, but we are all a part of it.

Anyway, my problem is that he seems to be of the mindset that programming is this extra-terrestrial mental heuristic which only the selected few have the capability of understanding. First and foremost, allow me to debunk this little issue. I studied computer programming in high-school and for a year (still while in high-school) I took advanced computer programming at the University of Pittsburgh near my house in Indiana, PA. For my part I learned Java and C++. Now that might not seem like many languages to learn—but keenly draw into the word I used there ‘languages’. Programming is nothing more than the formation and manipulation of a language!

Now it should be offered that I am definitely a friend to languages. When I came to WVU one of my four majors was Linguistics during which time I studied German, Spanish, and French—all at the same time. I must admit, I have a knack for quickly learning vocabulary, syntax, and semantic structures of a language—perhaps it’s because all languages are in fact the same at a core level. Indeed, I have never been taught basic Latin, but there is a chance that I could translate most things in Latin from my basic knowledge of Romance languages and from Grims’ Law—a rule which allows me to transpose Latin words and phrases into German – and I speak German rather fluently.

This is not all to gloat or anything that I know many languages—I started studying languages while I was in kindergarten to be the truth so it is merely a matter of circumstance perhaps that I have such an affinity for them—but instead to show that even programming languages have an inherent structure. All modern languages (save a small few tribal languages which still leave to debate on the issue) have been derived from the Proto-Endo European language, likewise, all programming languages have been derived from Binary, Assembly, FORTRAN and COBOL—in fact these three are parent and child respectfully as well. More interestingly, unless my history does not serve me correctly, Leibniz—the contended father of modern Calculus (contended with Newton that is)—had created the first binary computer system following Blaisé Pascal who had created the first mechanical calculator, the former of which used lead balls as a counting mechanism. In this way he was able to process mass calculations more quickly and efficiently. Leibniz—he’s from the 17th—that’s a long time ago. But here is the situation, you need only have a firm grasp of syntax and some basic mathematical calculations and you can be a programmer. Everything else, you can use a programmer’s dictionary which simply carries all the premade methods and functions that come with the development kit you purchased or are using. What’s even more, when you first learn a language poly-glotism begins to take over. Poly-glotism is the instantaneous learning of a language due to previous derived knowledge of that language—remember my Latin? In this case, once you learn one programming language it becomes easier to learn the second, then third, then fourth and then somewhere around the 5-8th languages –depending on relative intelligence—you will be able to obtain full programming and formation abilities in a language you learn that day. For example, just last week, I taught myself SQL programming languages for querying an Access database to help with my girlfriend’s thesis research. Now I know a total of 7 programming languages and 4 spoken languages. But my point here is that, unlike what Rushkoff is purporting, you do not need any particular skill to learn a programming language, perhaps the motivation, but it’s not that demoralizing once you get into it.

Attribution:
Leibniz Photo – As seen on Wikipedia.