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    Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty
    Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty
    Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty
    Audiobook6 hours

    Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty

    Written by Vikram Chandra

    Narrated by Neil Shah

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateFeb 10, 2015
    ISBN9781494578657
    Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty
    Author

    Vikram Chandra

    Vikram Chandra is the author of the novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain (Commonwealth Writers' Prize; David Higham Prize), and the short story collection Love and Longing in Bombay (Commonwealth Writers' Prize; New York Times Notable Book). Born in New Delhi, he divides his time between Mumbai and Berkeley, where he teaches at the University of California.

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    Reviews for Geek Sublime

    3.5/5

    40 ratings5 reviews

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    • 5/5
      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.
    • 1/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      "Geek Sublime: Writing Fiction, Coding Software" by Vikram Chandra


      A long time ago when I was doing Software Engineering professionally (I was a C/C black belt coder back in the good old days of obfuscated coding practices…) I always of very keen to put lots of style and readability into my code. Then I moved on because I wanted my code to be beautiful as well. It took me longer to write agreed, but it was more pleasing to the eye and the brain. From that time on I’ve always considered Software Engineering and programming in particular, to be a creative art, which for me necessarily involved aesthetics. Unfortunately some people considered aesthetics the enemy of the pragmatic, which was a view I’ve never been particularly fond of. I used to argue at the time that my sense of beauty served pragmatism much better, because it lead to more concise and maintainable code, and was thereby far more effective. I still believe this to this day, even though I haven’t created professional source code for a long time. Now I only do it at home and just for fun. And for that I use Python, which has been my programming framework of choice in recent years, because of its high readability (vide “The Zen of Python” by Tim Peters). It satisfies all my aesthetic views on this subject. I know it’s not an industrial language (eg, the versions for Android leave a lot to be desired), but from the aesthetic point of view it’s one of the most eye-catching programming languages I know, and I know a lot of them.


      You can find the rest of this review on my blog.
    • 4/5
      I am a computer programmer... I have designed and built computer circuit - LS7400 and wire-wrap! - written simple operating systems, I/O device drivers, and lots of application code. Half of Chandra's book is about hardware and software technology. It was well written and pulls in tasty morsels - e.g. a nice story of programming on a machine with drum storage, and using placement of instructions on the drum to introduce desired delay - so I was never bored or felt like skipping anything.I am also a student of Indian philosophy. Chandra here dives into the rasa aesthetic theory of Abhinavagupta. I have heard a bit about that before but never in any depth at all. Chandra sketches out the basics very nicely. I felt like I really learned something.I'm not exactly sure how these two parts of the book were intended to fit together. Certainly it was a delight to learn about Panini's grammar and how that has given Sanskrit a formal structure and a kind of timeless quality. But then the rasa theory shows how meaning is not really so timeless, since it depends on resonance with memories of the reader.I think the idea is to contrast this time-dependent quality of literature with the mechanical timelessness of software. But really most software is hardly self-contained at all It's shot through with interfaces to other packages and services. That's a lot of why software needs to be maintained, because the other systems it's connected to are always changing. The meaning of software is also quite time-dependent! Or maybe that was Chandra's point and I just missed it? Or maybe, rasa-style, he just suggested it so it feels like I figured it out for myself? Not impossible!The book felt like a short little wade on the edge of a vast ocean, maybe like in South Africa, where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet.
    • 4/5
      I'm having trouble figuring out how to summarize this book, and I think that tells you something about the problems with it.There is a lot of really fascinating information in here, but it doesn't really hold together. Chandra is trying to write about the relationship between programming and literature, specifically Sanskrit literature. In the first chapters, he talks about the world of computer programming, especially the machismo and racism that are built into today's programming culture. He sets up a straw man: some programmers talk about code as art. The middle chapters of the book focus on Sanskrit literature. At first, the connection to programming seems clear: early Sanskrit grammarians wrote a set of rules that sound very much like coding algorithms, and some of the early coding languages took these ancient Sanskrit grammars into account when inventing their artificial languages. But then Chandra veers off into a discussion of Indian aesthetics. This is fascinating information, but it's really hard to tell where he's going with it.Actually, here is where I think he was going with it: he needed to get this off his chest. He needed to explore it for his own development as an Indian-American writer. He needed to understand his Sanskrit roots, and how they manifest in his post-colonial literature. He wrote these chapters for himself, so that he could come to terms with his Indian past and how it fits into his American present.But then, at the very end, he remembers that he has set out to write a book about programming, so he has a very brief chapter in which he argues that the theory of aesthetics does not apply to code, so code isn't art and that's the end of that. I am glad I read this book. There is a lot of fascinating information in it. I myself am a programmer who took it up after years as an artist (musician and writer), and I have studied a lot of postcolonial literature, so the information in this book is right up my alley. Unfortunately, Chandra's argument really didn't have much coherence, and I feel like this was mostly a personal exploration for Chandra's own benefit.