Forging Source

Abstract

This chapter presents the observation of computer programmers along three axes with clear relevance to craft: materiality, aesthetics, and embodiment. It explains the details of the materiality of “plain text” and source code, the aesthetic considerations of the most common tools of the programmer, and the bodily praxis indexed by the programmer’s primary physical interface: the keyboard. The chapter argues that in applying the label of “craft” to their activity, programmers are expressing a sublimated tension, one created by a pervasive shift in how humans relate to “the built environment” and to the political configurations within which that environment is produced. It presents “text” as the raw material of the programmer, arguing that those aspects of materiality central to the analysis of craft are robustly sustained among digital artisans. The chapter consider two levels of apparatus phenomenologically closest to the programmer him- or herself so as to reveal the ordering of programming as craft: the text editor and the keyboard.