Can programming and debugging be made interesting in fiction?
The culture of computing often is hard to represent in other media. Films about hackers always have trouble conveying the excitement of using a terminal (typing and recieving text.) Only with VR could visual representations of information be developed to aide the richness of a movie. But now there are serious novelists weaving computing culture into novels. Powers, Coupland, and Ullman.
These writers are both drawing tropes from computing that they can develop in real (fictional worlds) and commenting on the culture of computing which has had such a hold on our imagination.
Ullman’s The Bug is an example of literature that draws themes from the details of computing (malloc – memory allocation, core dump, Game of Life) rather than mock them.
See Techno-culture ala Ellen Ullman (Update 2003, The Bug) (twURLed World Description) for links.
A good, though not great novel about a bug that haunts a team developing an early GUI database system. The story is woven around two characters affected by the bug. There is Walton who is a failed academic who becomes a tester (Quality Engineer) and discovers the bug. There is Levin the programmer who is supposed to fix it. Over the novel the programmer falls apart, but in the process inspires the tester to learn to progam and go on to a successful career in computing. The programmer committs suicide after he is abandoned by just about everyone (girlfriend leaves and he alienates everyone else) – like a cell in the Game of Life that has no neighbors, he doesnt survive the turn while the tester morphs, migrates and survives.
Ullman’s novel is realistic on the programming and computer culture – she was a programmer and the treatment of the culture is authentic and detailed. There is forced, but valiant introduction to programming starting on page 169. It is the best attempt to actually describe learning to program with all the details I can think of. (It could actually be used as an introduction to programming.) In particular I like the way she shows programmers dealing with GUIs in the mid-80s after the Mac came out. The bug in question is ultimately some sloppy UI programming of the menu/mouse interface.
The connection to the Game of Life is interesting. What is she trying to say about the game on the computer and the life of computing? I also like how she meditates on various computing terms like “malloc” (memory allocation) and “mallocchio” (evil eye.) “Memory Leak” is the name of a chapter, as is “Core Dump”. She is able to make technical jargon with its capricious allusions into fiction.
The novel ends, “I like to think it (finding the bug) would have reassured him, saved him: To know that at the heart of the problem was the ancient mystery of time. To discover that between the blinks of the machine’s shuttered eye – going on without pause or cease: simulated, imagined, but still not caught – was life.” (p. 348)
Here lies the most interesting idea – the tension between continuous life and computing that is sampled, simulated in discrete moves, and blinking. The bug was due to a sampling problem, the Game of Life simulates life as if it were a series of states controlled by simple rules of tranformation … between the samples there is something not caught by the machine and that is really what life is.
Ellen Ullman, The Bug, New York: Nan. A. Talese, 2003.