Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

doing battle in the same subroutine. Scripts almost—but not quite—deprecated. The situation is quite a bit more under control now, 3 years later.
    —Espe
    PERL: HACKING IN THE BIG BALL OF MUD
    Perl has been derided by many people as an ugly, difficult to learn language that enforces bad habits. I generally do not advocate perl to people who are attempting to learn programming, or even mention it’s existence. However, perl, for better or worse, is a culmination of decades of culture. Perl is a Unix Gematria—an arcane relation of symbols evolved in a manner similar to Jewish Qabbalistic numerology. Many other languages, such as python or Java, attempt to enforce a strict framework and rule set of contracts, interfaces, strong typing, and private methods to delineate functionality. While much of this stems from noble traditions of SmallTalk and ML [they are computer languages], much of it also fails to realize the point of these ancestral languages: categorization (such as through strict typing and object models) is itself a form of computation. When this fact is not respected, you wind up with a bastardized language that is [ … ] Anal.
    Perl was designed by a linguist, and realizes that people have different things to say in different contexts, and your language is defined by the environment and not vice versa. As Paul Graham said, both the world and programming is a “Big Ball of Mud,” which perl has evolved around. The implicit variables, the open object model, the terse expressions all contribute to hacking on the Big Ball of Mud.
    Finally, there is a very pragmatic reason to like perl: It will save your ass. Those who are fluent enough in the culture to realize that “this problem has been solved before,” will be able to invoke forces through perl. Again, similar to the numerologists, with a few arcane symbols that are undecipherable to the outside world, great acts of magik can be accomplished.
    —Da Mystik Homeboy
    Espe is a San Francisco hacker who is clearly fond of Python, an open-source computer language. Originally created by a Dutch programmer as a teaching language, Python is now a thriving open-source project. The language’s distinguishing feature (both aesthetic and technical) is its strict technical parameters that require bold syntactic clarity. For example,Python is unusual among programming languages in that the amount of space used to indent a line of code actually affects the code’s meaning. On his blog (excerpted above), Espe explains how he was able to hack to his heart’s delight for no other reason than to experience “the joy of programming.” His stance toward Python is reverent, rooted in deep pleasure. He obviously adores both the formal structure—Python—and the substance—coffee—that have enabled him to hack for his own enjoyment and self-development. In this instance, Espe constructs programming as a pleasing, unencumbered exercise of ample creativity. He seeks in hacking to reach the elusive quality of perfection.
    By the next paragraph, however, his register shifts to one of dismayed irreverence toward another programming language, Perl, considered by many to be the antithesis of Python, and therefore a source of antipathy for many Python fanatics. Eventually forced to hack for money (a problem itself for this programmer), he was handed “a worst-case scenario.” Poorly coded Perl transformed programming from an activity of boundless satisfaction into a nightmarish ordeal. Espe describes this unfavorable turn of events as being plucked from his “high tower of control and purity,” only to be “thrown into a bubbling pool of vaguery and confusion.” In having to read and parse other people’s codes, programmers routinely encounter what has been depicted aptly as a “twisting maze of corridors, a bottomless pit” (Ullman 2003, 262).
    In the second extract, we have DMH, also a San Francisco hacker, but unlike Espe, a self-styled Perl alchemist. Perl’s creator, a linguist and programmer named Larry Wall, intended the code to embody the flexible and often-irrational properties of a natural language. As noted by DMH, Perl’s aesthetic and technical features are opaqueness, complexity, and flexibility. Also run as an open-source project, Perl is incorporated into the identity of many of its supporters, who call themselves Perl Monks, underscoring the single-minded dedication they have for what is considered a language that can produce poetic (or