Reading Response #4

to Artful Design • Chapter 4: “Programmability & Sound Design”

Oluseyi O.

10/22/2023

Music 256A / CS476a, Stanford University

Reading Response: Why so many languages?

From this week’s reading, I’d like to respond to an idea presented on page 172 after the introduction of Chuck, where Ge writes “I think this may be why we have so many programming languages. It’s not so much that they all do different things, but that each one makes you think differently”. Reading this made me think about the xkcd comic I’ve posted above. Even though the comic is specifically about standards, I have seen it used in reference to programming languages as well before. Definitely when first beginning to code and program, I did wonder why there were so many different languages as opposed to having just one universal language. From my current perspective as a senior studying computer science, I’ve come to realize that different programming languages have different strengths and weaknesses and that it would be functionally impossible to have one god language that was able to do just everything perfectly. Still, it felt novel to me to see the idea that each programming language makes you think differently, even if it feels a little obvious in retrospect.

Seeing all the different examples of computer music programming languages brought up at the end of the chapter really elucidated this idea to me; I didn’t even realize how many different musical languages there were. But when you think about each different language as a different way of thinking, it makes a lot of sense. There are so many different ways of thinking about and approaching problems across the human experience, due to everyone’s unique experiences and skillsets. A solution that is obvious to someone may be the last thing someone else thinks about. I even got a taste of that in the demonstrations of the visualizers last week as despite it being the same assignment everyone’s visualizer was entirely unique’ everyone had a different way of thinking about and doing the assignment which led to a wide variety of designs.

The comic above insinuates the idea that having so many competing standards or coding languages in this case is silly. But what I think is actually the silly part is attempting to create a standard or language that can truly be universal and cover everything equally well. In other words, ironically, the solution to the comic may be to have even more standards and languages. In that way, everyone can find the standard that best suits their own unique way of thinking. I suppose in a practical sense, ultimately not everyone can have their own unique coding language and standard. There has to be a compromise on some level; a bridge between unique ways of thinking. Perhaps the ultimate goal of standards and languages are to create a standard/language for as many diverse schools of thought as possible?