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The Software Arts

An alternative history of software that places the liberal arts at the very center of software's evolution. In The Software Arts, Warren Sack offers an alternative history of computing that places the arts at the very center of software's evolution. Tracing the origins of software to eighteenth-century French encyclopedists' step-by-step descriptions of how things were made in the workshops of artists and artisans, Sack shows that programming languages are the offspring of an effort to describe the mechanical arts in the language of the liberal arts. Sack offers a reading of the texts of computing--code, algorithms, and technical papers--that emphasizes continuity between prose and programs. He translates concepts and categories from the liberal and mechanical arts--including logic, rhetoric, grammar, learning, algorithm, language, and simulation--into terms of computer science and then considers their further translation into popular culture, where they circulate as forms of digital life. He considers, among other topics, the "arithmetization" of knowledge that presaged digitization; today's multitude of logics; the history of demonstration, from deduction to newer forms of persuasion; and the post-Chomsky absence of meaning in grammar. With The Software Arts, Sack invites artists and humanists to see how their ideas are at the root of software and invites computer scientists to envision themselves as artists and humanists.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.

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Series Title
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Call Number
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Publisher
Cambridge, United Kingdom : The MIT Press.,
Collation
1 online resource (400 pages) :illustrations.
Language
English
ISBN/ISSN
9780262352369
Classification
NONE
Content Type
text
Media Type
computer
Carrier Type
online resource
Edition
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Subject(s)
Computer software
Electronic data processing
Specific Detail Info
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Statement of Responsibility
Other Information
Cataloger
oci
Source
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Validator
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Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9495.001.0001
Journal Volume
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Journal Issue
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