Geek Sublime

May 26, 2014
Novelist Chandra (Sacred Games) explores the connections between the worlds of computer programming and writing, beginning with the fact that “oth writers and programmers struggle with language.” In a short span, the book offers much material to consider, leaping from a history of computer programming and a primer on logic gates and how these programs work, to a personal of Chandra’s writing life, to some serious philosophical inquiry into how the term “beauty” might be applied to programming. The latter thread draws mainly on the rasa-dhvani theory of aesthetic analysis (from Indian philosophers Anandavardhana and Abhinavagupta), and although the ideas presented are sometimes challenging, Chandra provides more than sufficient intellectual guidance. Chandra’s book calls for a fuller appreciation of the programming world, not only because of the exponentially growing roles software plays in our lives, but also because of the actual work programmers do; in fact, he says of comparisons between programming and other disciplines, “When programmers say what they do is just like what writers do, or gardeners, or painters, the error is that they aren’t claiming enough, the fault is that they are being too humble.” Chandra’s melodic prose further adds to the contingency of his ambitious ideas. This book is truly a relic of today’s day and age.

June 15, 2014
A fruitful exploration of computer-age aesthetics, when artists are making use of programming even as programmers consider themselves artists."Poetry's beauty is infinite," writes programmer and acclaimed novelist Chandra (Sacred Games, 2007, etc.). True enough, but Windows Vista's code is still infinitely kludgy, even if, as the author argues, the "iterative processes of programming-write, debug (discover and remove bugs, which are coding errors, mistakes), rewrite, experiment, debug, rewrite-exactly duplicate the methods of artists." It is an argument that Chandra advances with great subtlety, though it perhaps does not help his case that most of his more extensive examples come from the corpus of Indian, and particularly Sanskrit, literature, which will make that argument sometimes challenging to follow for some readers. Gradually, the book loosens into what at times seem to be only marginally connected essays: Gender parity and code parity are much different things, and the bigness of epics such as the Mahabharata is considerably different from the bigness of big data. Still, there is a charm to Chandra's sometimes-exotic approach, even as he circles back to some of his central questions: What makes a poem beautiful? Can we use the criteria we employ to answer that question to evaluate a computer program as well? The answers he proposes occasionally open onto still other questions, as with this one: "When programmers say what they do is just like what writers do, or gardeners, or painters, the error is that they aren't claiming enough, the fault is that they are being too humble. To compare code to works of literature may point the programmer towards legibility and elegance, but it says nothing about the ability of code to materialize logic."An engaging exercise in interdisciplinary thought, both elegant and eloquent. Besides, who can resist a text that works karma, Marcel Duchamp and iterative programming into a single thought?

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September 1, 2014
Chandra's (Sacred Games, 2007) first nonfiction book provides a key to the webby complexity of his fiction and awakens fresh appreciation for computer code's world-changing properties. Chandra came to the U.S. from Bombay to attend Columbia University for his second degree and write fiction. Seeking work in 1986, he discovered his gift for digital technology and turned himself into a freelance computer programmer: Fiction has been my vocation, and code my obsession. There are many correlations between the two. As Chandra, brainy, delving, and spellbinding, delineates the intricacy and beauty of code, he also identifies historical and social forces at play in the machismo and misogyny of programming culture, the ubiquity of the Indian geek, and the dangerously decaying software used by governmental bureaucracies. As Chandra illuminates links between programming and literature in bedazzling elucidations of Sanskrit, linguistics, aesthetics, and Hindu, Tantric, and Buddhist beliefs, he also conducts unique and heady inquiries into codes, ethical as well as binary. Chandra's creative and elegant meshing of thought and experience, conscience and storytelling nets both the profane and the sublime.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)