In his new book, The Software Arts, UC Santa Cruz professor Warren Sack presents an alternative history of computing that puts the arts at the center of software’s evolution.
Tracing the origins of software back to the step-by-step instructions of how things were created in the workshops of 18th-century artists and artisans, he illustrates how today’s programming languages are the upshot of past efforts to describe the mechanical arts in the language of the liberal arts.
As a result, Sack views his book as an invitation to artists and humanists to see how their ideas are at the very root of software, as well as an invitation to computer scientists to envision themselves as artists and humanists. [more...]
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