I was going down a rabbit hole of software development things yesterday, and came across Larry Wall’s talk about Perl being a ’the first postmodern language’. It struck me that, in a way, every programming language is a manifesto about what programming. Not what programming does (they all do the same thing, make the computer do what you tell it to), but what the experience of programming should be and how a programmer should program. Unlike natural languages, programming languages are designed, and the designer’s intents, implicitly or explicitly, is there in the end product. Sometimes actual manifestos are included as supplementary text (e.g. The Zen of Python), but the cool thing is that the language itself is both a manifesto and a tool.
Perhaps this is obvious for people who are engrossed in the culture of software and tech, but for an accidental developer like me, it’s a rather interesting revelation.