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Robert Lefkowitz, comes from the USA, from New York.

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He worked many years in IT (information technology)

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and he has worked in telecommunications in Wall Street

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and a few other places he's worked in

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At present he's the Chief Technical Officer and co-founder in Sharewave

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He's also writing a book that explores universal programming literacy and open source

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Which is the present interest in his talk and the main reason why he's here

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to share with us some of his knowledge and ideas

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about open source and universal programming literacy

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Talking about this in particular helped him figure out a way to continue with his book

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so if anyone has ideas or suggestions you can contact him eventually

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So, let's welcome now Robert "ℝ∅ⅯⅬ" Lefkowitz with a warm round of applause

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[clapping]

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thank you

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I'm very excited to be here

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and I apologize that I cannot speak in Spanish

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but I was invited to speak, I did not have time to learn Spanish in time for this

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This is a continuation or a reprise of a talk that I gave in PyCon in 2007 in the US

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and I heard that some of you have heard this before. So, indulge me.

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I'm from New York,

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New Yorkers have a reputation for being fast talkers

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so I'm trying to slow down.

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But if I get excited, which I may very well get excited, then I'll start speeding up and I'll be going much faster than I us...

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then if somebody would... [waves his arms]

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remind me that I should slow down then I would appreciate it.

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I'm not a python... eh...

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I'm not a pythonista.

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So, I assume that the reason that I was invited here, my contribution to the python community is that

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when my son learned to program in school he learned to program in Java because they taught in Java...

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and I convinced him to learn Python instead.

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And then he went on to write Twisted. [clapping]

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And so, Twisted is my first grandchild. [laughter]

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But other than that, I have...

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my interest, my involvement in Python is certainly nowhere near as much as my son's.

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I'm interested in Rhetoric

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That's why I'm speaking!

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And my thesis is that...

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Rhetoric and Programming are the same thing

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or to put it another way, the...

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that the 21st century extension of the classical art of Rhetoric we call Programming

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and that's what I wanna talk about.

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The reason to talk about it, is that "if" programming is literacy

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and literacy is programming,

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then if we have 2000 years of history, or maybe more with literacy and literacy education

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and so there might be something that we can learn

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for what we did right or what we did wrong

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But of course they might be different than literacy

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and we should understand those differences if we can, as well.

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This is not a new idea. This is not...

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my idea.

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It was a very popular idea in the 80s

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Now, one of the things...

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because I only have an hour and a half for this talk...

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or two...

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[laughter]

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And it would be not enough time to talk about everything that I was to talk about...

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So I'm in the habit of providing book references,

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for people that are interested in particular topics.

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So I have many of my slides with book references.

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You don't have to copy them all down,

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if you email me I will surely send you the slides and the bibliography

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It's curious, you will notice, that most of the books that I'm quoting here...

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were written between 1984 and 1986 for some reason.

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Donald Knuth gave a name to this thing that I'm talking about

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which was "Literate Programming".

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And the way he phrased it was that Programming...

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"A Programmer could be regarded as an essayist,

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whose main concern is with exposition and excellence of style."

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And he invented a system, which he called WEB.

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And the reason he called it WEB, actually is pretty funny.

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It was, he wrote:

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"It was the only three letter word in the English language that I could find,

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that wasn't used for something in computers."

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So WEB was this system where if you wrote a program,

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it would either run through a compiler,

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or, it could be published as a paper in computer science.

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So the idea that the text was both a program and an essay.

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That was the WEB system.

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And Knuth wasn't the only one.

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In 1985, Abelson and Sussman published their textbook on computer science, and

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in the introduction he starts with:

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"First we want to establish the idea that a computer language...

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is not just a way to get a computer to perform operations,

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but rather that it is a novel medium for expressing ideas about methodology.

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Thus, programs must be written for people to read. And only incidentally for machines to execute."

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So here we have both the East coast's and the West coast's of the United States professors, saying:

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"Nah, programs are the way people talk to each other about algorithms.

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And the computers have nothing to do with it."

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And it was right about this time, in 1984 that Richard Stallman writes the GNU manifest.

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What does he say about that?

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"Well, you need access to the source, because it's a requisite for people to be able to read the software."

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It's all part of that same feeling that in the 80s we had this idea that...

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software was about people and not about machines.

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In fact, this is a slide from a presentation Guido van Rossum gave in 1999,

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in which he was talking about his CP4E initiative. "Computer Programming for Everybody",

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in which he was going to teach everybody how to program.

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The CP4E project is dormant, according to Wikipedia.

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So, what happened?

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In the 1980s every book that you picked up about computer science...

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talks about how it's all about people, it's not about machines.

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And today it's much more about machines.

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And a little bit about people.

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So, I want to understand...

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I wanna bring back actually to the CP4E idea.

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That everybody can program.

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Because we teach everybody how to read!

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And if it's about <i>reading</i>...

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then we should understand the history of literacy.

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So I'm going to take a "small" 40 minute diversion to talk about the history of literacy.

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But because this is a programming crowd...

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I will then bring it back to programming and to talk about programming languages of the future,

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assuming that we have a sort of literate view of programming once again.

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My favorite book on Rhetoric is written by Sister Miriam Joseph and the first edition was published in 1938.

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And Sister...

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This book is about the Trivium, so...

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the curriculum in the Middle Ages, they taught three things to everybody:

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They taught Logic,

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Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric.

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Rhetoric being the most advanced of the three.

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Since it was three things, it was called the Trivium,

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and this is where we get our english word "Trivial",

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which means "something anybody knows",

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because in the beginning, it was the university course of these three things, but...

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eventually they taught it to everybody, and the thing that everybody knew was Trivial.

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Here's the definition:

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"Logic is concerned with the thing as it is known.

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Grammar with the thing as it is symbolized.

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And Rhetoric is concerned with the thing as it is communicated."

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And this was the sentence that made me think: "She's talking about programming!"

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If rhetoric is the art of communicating through symbols ideas about reality,

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how is that different than programming?

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Programming is in fact communicating ideas about reality to machines.

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And other people.

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So, rhetoric is the Master Art. It is programming.

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When we talk to machines, we are using the rhetoric of the machine.

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So, this idea of language and literacy that I...

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not only infuses the...

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programmers of the 80s, but the philosophers of the 60s and the 40s.

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A famous collection of essays which is called "The Linguistic Turn", came out in 1967,

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which had a group of essays from philosophers through the 30s and 40s.

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And my favorite out of those is Bertrand Russell.

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Is quoted to say:

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that "by means of the study of syntax,

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we can come to a considerable knowledge concerning the structure of the world."

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Which I think a programmer would appreciate.

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So, if rhetoric (or programming) is communicating ideas about reality to people and machines,

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then we have a bit of a duality.

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So the literacy part is communicating ideas to people,

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and the Engineering part is communicating ideas to machines.

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And that may be different.

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That may be why we isolate back and forth between...

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thinking of programming as something we do between people,

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and thinking of programming as sort of a mechanical art that we use to make machines...

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do the things that we want them to do.

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It's because when you write a program you are talking to two classes of beings.

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So in 1986 in a study of literacy, Havelock discovers a general pattern of literacy,

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which she writes about.