This is just a quick post almost as a placeholder for further thinking. I was listening to the latest episode of Spark! on CBC Radio about Cracking the code of beauty to find the beauty of code. Vikram Chandra is a fiction author as well as a programmer and was talking about the difference between the two mediums.

It’s definitely worth a listen [MP3]

The thing that struck me was the (perhaps obvious) insight that when writing code you have to be as denotative as possible. That is to say ambiguity is a bad thing leading to imprecision, bugs, and hard-to-read code. That’s not the case with fiction, which relies on connotation.

This reminded me of a paper I wrote a couple of years ago with my thesis supervisor about a ‘continuum of ambiguity’. In it, we talk about the overlap between the denotative and connotative aspects of a word, term, or phrase being the space in which ambiguity occurs. For everything other than code, it would appear, this is the interesting and creative space.

I’ve recently updated the paper to merge comments from the 'peer review’ I did with people in my network. I also tidied it up a bit and made it look a bit nicer.

Read it here: Digital literacy, digital natives, and the continuum of ambiguity

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Comments? Questions? Email me: doug@mozillafoundation.org

http://literaci.es/denotative-programming