Reviews, Links, Code, and Discussion
Some links to discussion about 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10. One of the common ways to interact with the idea seems to be writing and posting re-implementations of the program in other languages and environments. Geeta Dayal’s review of the book in Slate. Discussion on Reddit r/Programming, including a hilarious Enterprise Java version. A discussion at Stack Overflow stemming… read more
A whole book about a single line of code. By ten authors.
This book is available in digital or physical format. Buy from Amazon This book takes a single line of code—the extremely concise BASIC program for the Commodore 64 inscribed in the title—and uses it as a lens through which to consider the phenomenon of creative computing and the way computer programs exist in culture.The authors of this collaboratively written book… read more
A new book in software studies
My next book is even stranger than my last. It’s an entire book, 65,000+ words worth, about a single-line Commodore 64 BASIC program that is inscribed in the book’s title, 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10. And if that isn’t strange enough, I wrote the book with nine other collaborators (Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C.… read more
D. Scott Williamson's "impossible" adaptation
In the fifth chapter of Racing the Beam, Nick and I discuss Howard Scott Warshaw’s popular Atari game Yars’ Revenge. The game is often called Atari’s most successful original game for the Atari 2600, but in fact it was originally meant to be an adaptation of Star Castle, a then-popular vector-graphics game by Cinematronics. But, because of the very different… read more
In the New Scientist "Big Ideas" column
Are everyday objects, such as apple pies or microchips, aliens? It depends how you think about what it’s like to be a thing. This essay appeared in the
Thoughts on the material conditions of programming practice
I was corresponding yesterday with Jock Murphy, a Portland-based photographer, software engineer, and mobile game developer. Jock had read Racing the Beam, and we were talking about the relative differences between the 6502 and the Z80 microprocessors. This subject led us to different programming practices, a topic Nick and I discuss in RtB in relation to the Atari, but for… read more
...and secure your fame and fortune forever*
Nick Montfort and I were thinking about the Platform Studies series today, as we are wont to do. There are two books in the series that are nearing completion now, which we are delighted about, but there are many more to be written. We were talking about some platforms that we thought were large and low-hanging fruit for any interested… read more
On substituting programming languages for natural languages in the humanities
Last year I learned about a rumor swirling around the comparative literature department at UCLA, where I did my PhD. Supposedly I had managed to get C++ to count as one of the three languages required for the degree. It’s not true, for the record, but it is a topic that comes up from time to time—substituting programming languages for… read more
Stuff I said to the Press
I thought I’d share few recent mentions of me in the media. I try not to do this with every little mention, but all of these are really good articles that you should read anyway. First, Chris Suellentrop’s New York Times Magazine story Video Games that Bring Afghanistan Home. It’s a wide-ranging feature, and even though I only have one… read more
Object-Oriented Misunderstandings
A while back Jim Brown mentioned to me that there would be an object-oriented rhetoric panel at this year’s Rhetoric Society of America conference. Jim attended RSA but wasn’t able to make the panel; still, he’s managed to dig up the papers and he wrote up a summary over on the RSA’s Blogora. I’m not yet sure what object-oriented rhetoric… read more