Pursuit of Humane Computing

Recently via my Mastodon friend Paolo Amoroso, I was informed about the existence of a Lisp book called “A Programmer’s Guide to Common Lisp” by Deborah G. Tatar. As often happens, when I find a good book (and her Lisp book is really good), I find myself looking them up to see where their research went. After Deborah’s auspicious beginnings in and among the Xerox PARC thing, she appears to have relocated to the Eastern region and is now professor emerita at Virginia Tech. As I stepped through her CVs and research interests; as I crossed web pages that clearly hadn’t been updated since the last Mideast “excursion,” I noticed that she recurrently talked about programming as social endeavor falling apart. In this, she recalled Naur’s “Programming as Theory Building.” The phrase that really stood out in my mind is when she claimed that many programming teams were hamstrung by the inability of programmers to display the necessary resilience and adaptive capability that they ought have learned on the playground.

Clearly, Deb, we don’t do playgrounds much any more.

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