The Semasiology of Open Source
I just finished listening to
part 1 and
part 2 of Robert Lefkowitz's talk The Semasiology of Open Source.
Computer source code has words and sentence structure like actual prose or even poetry. Writing code for the computer is like writing an essay. It should be written for other people to read, understand and modify. These are some of the thoughts behind literate programming proposed by Donald Knuth. This is also one of the ideas behind Open Source.Robert is a very entertaining speaker and manages to convey some deep insights into the nature of software and our current location on the development curve of software literacy.
Here's a short biographical sketch about Robert Lefkowitz on O'Reilly Radar.