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Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty (2013)

par Vikram Chandra

Membres	Critiques	Popularité	Évaluation moyenne	Mentions
287	12	91,892	(3.38)	4
Biography & Autobiography. Nonfiction. Vikram Chandra has been a computer programmer for almost as long as he has been a novelist. In this extraordinary new book, his first work of nonfiction, he searches for the connections between the worlds of art and technology. Coders are obsessed with elegance and style, just as writers are, but do the words mean the same thing to both? Can we ascribe beauty to the craft of writing code? Exploring such varied topics as logic gates and literary modernism, the machismo of tech geeks, the omnipresence of an "Indian Mafia" in Silicon Valley, and the writings of the eleventh-century Kashmiri thinker Abhinavagupta, Geek Sublime is both an idiosyncratic history of coding and a fascinating meditation on the writer's art. Part literary essay, part technology story, and part memoir, it is an engrossing, original, and heady book of sweeping ideas.… (plus d'informations)

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Only 1/3 about code; the rest was Indian philosophy which went a bit over my head. That a formal grammar for Sanskrit was developed a few thousand years BCE was amazing. (

)

Castinet | Dec 10, 2022 |

This guy broke my brain and I loved it. Code, Indian literature, computers, memoir all deliciously stirred together. In some ways, it may seem that he jumps all over the place but honestly this book just flows so nicely and you’re learning at the same time and it all meshes.

A definite recommend (

)

pacbox | Jul 9, 2022 |

This book is initially about the experience of computer program coding, but morphs into excursions into Panini linguistics and Sanskrit poetry. It's really an interesting book even if it isn't tightly woven. Indian philosophy is very broad ranging and the Sanskrit language is the mother lode of the Indo-European language grammar. As a person who likes comparative linguistics I sometimes have a different perspective on morphology and its effects. Chandra discusses the phrase gangayam ghoshah (a village on the Ganga) and I can see that the first word is accusative, but Chandra, under the influence of Anandavardhana is taken with this expression's figurative or metaphorical implications, whereas I would start with morphology and then proceed.

Although I learned Fortran in the late 1960s, I did not become a coder but only wrote programs very infrequently. (

)

vpfluke | Apr 20, 2021 |

There were some interesting ideas in here, but it was sorely lacking in coherent narrative. Was an editor involved in this project? It seems unlikely given the prose that I could barely follow. I'm surprised that the author is a successful novelist. Based on this experience I won't be trying any of those novels. (

)

christopher.hicks | Apr 10, 2020 |

A little too encyclopedic on the Indian poetry/Sanskrit, but a good description of what creativity looks like when writing code. (

)

raheelahmad | Mar 22, 2020 |

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thingScore 88

(...) a compendium of delight in which Chandra delves with relish into the bowels of technology and the intricate mechanisms of linguistic suggestion, drawing on his own experiences to create an extraordinary thesis that is part autobiography, part crash course in coding and unfailingly an ode to language.

(...) an eloquent tribute to text and its ability to shape our emotions, and rewrite the very world we live in.

ajouté par timtom | modifierThe Guardian, Nicola Davis (Mar 23, 2014)

Chandra is brilliant at technical exegesis – explaining logic gates, or evoking the appeal of "object-oriented programming" – but he also casts a sceptical eye on modern coding culture, especially its generalised misogyny.

ajouté par timtom | modifierThe Guardian, Steven Poole (Feb 26, 2014)

(...) a thought-provoking set of linked essays that are part memoir, part analysis of geeks, part aesthetic treatise.
(...) a delight to read and never prescriptive.

ajouté par timtom | modifierThe Telegraph, Iain Pears (Feb 15, 2014)

partly aesthetic analysis, partly an investigation of linguistic theory, partly a history of programming— (...) an entirely original work.

ajouté par timtom | modifierThe Economist (Feb 8, 2014)

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Prix et récompenses

National Book Critics Circle Award (Finaliste – Criticism – 2014)

Distinctions

NPR: Books We Love (2014)

San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year (Non-fiction – 2014)

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Geek Sublime: Writing Fiction; Coding Software

Date de première publication

2013

Personnes ou personnages

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Anandavardahana

Abhinavagupta

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Premiers mots

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class Program

{

public static void Main ()

{

System.Console.WriteLine( "Hello, world!" );

}

}

Even if you're the type of person who tells new acquaintances at dinner parties that you hate e-mail and e-books, you probably recognize the words above as being some sort of computer code.

Citations

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The second postcard from Alan Turing to Robin Gandy contains:

III. The Universe is the interior of the Light Cone of the Creation.

IV. Science is a Differential Equation. Religion is a Boundary Condition.

Third postcard:

V. Hyperboloids of wondrous Light

Rolling for aye through Space and Time

Harbour there Waves which somehow Might

Play out God's holy pantomime.

Derniers mots

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(Cliquez pour voir. Attention : peut vendre la mèche.)

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Poole, Steven

Pears, Iain

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▾Descriptions de livres

Biography & Autobiography. Nonfiction. Vikram Chandra has been a computer programmer for almost as long as he has been a novelist. In this extraordinary new book, his first work of nonfiction, he searches for the connections between the worlds of art and technology. Coders are obsessed with elegance and style, just as writers are, but do the words mean the same thing to both? Can we ascribe beauty to the craft of writing code? Exploring such varied topics as logic gates and literary modernism, the machismo of tech geeks, the omnipresence of an "Indian Mafia" in Silicon Valley, and the writings of the eleventh-century Kashmiri thinker Abhinavagupta, Geek Sublime is both an idiosyncratic history of coding and a fascinating meditation on the writer's art. Part literary essay, part technology story, and part memoir, it is an engrossing, original, and heady book of sweeping ideas.

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