In his autobiographical work Dawn of the New Everything: A Journey Through Virtual Reality, VR pioneer and founder of the company Visual Programming Languages Jaron Lanier explains his view of software code which has a lot of overlap with the view laid out in the present study. Lanier references Admiral Grace Hopper – the inventor of the first linker (program to convert human-readable code to machine-readable code) and one of the great pioneers of the early history of computer programming. He explains that Hopper originated many of the “core patterns for how software is still created today,” such as the duality between source code and the executable, the back-and-forth alteration between writing code and testing the running program, the compiler, and the hierarchy of assembler and high-level languages.812 Such artefacts and practices, asserts Lanier, are fundamentally arbitrary. They are the result of specific design decisions which could historically have gone another way. The work patterns and steps for developing software could easily be completely different.
The decisions made during the history of computing regarding how programming would be done were made on the cultural level and not on the scientific level. Lanier writes:
There was never a reason to think… all software always had to follow the pattern set by Hopper… The only things that are fundamental and inviolable – truly real – while you are using a computer are you and the run of patterns of bits inside the computers. The abstractions linking those two real phenomena are not real. Everything between you and the hardware is a cultural decision. Lanier has a justified complaint about software programming being too obsessively exact: “You have to become a robot to program a robot.”
He imagines a completely different practice of programming which might have come about. This was the vision of his 1980s company. He would like a scenario “where you could paint and repaint the bits on a screen, so that a program could be redone as it was running.”815 You could change all the rules in real-time and on the fly while inside the real-slash-simulation software. You would be immersed in Virtual Reality and melded in partnership with the virtual world or game – rather than being the programmer-subject locked in a dualistic anthropocentric controlling relationship with the program. Programming would be more artistic, intuitive, symbolic, and experimental. Lanier writes:
I suspect that if computer programming had evolved along these lines, the whole society would be different today… A more concrete, visual, and immediately editable style of computation would be modeless and better suited to VR. You would be able to change the world while you are inside.
Lanier calls this new way of programming “phenotropic” – which means surfaces turning towards each other. Two entities interact with each other’s surfaces via pattern recognition observation. He cites music as his inspiration for user interface design and software expressivity. “The programming of the future will have to be a lot like jazz.”