What is software, anyway? Where does it come from? It is very reasonable to compare a computer program (i.e., software) to a music program (i.e., a musical score). The eminent composer Phillip Glass says that music is a "place," a place that once you've been there, you want to return. I'd say the same of software: it's a "place."
Philip Glass and Music
I attended a conversation between Chuck Close and Philip Glass at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last night. At the end of their informative and entertaining conversation (for example, I didn't know that the sculptor Richard Serra -- here's one of his steel sculptures, with a person in the picture to give a sense of scale --
was close to both of them, employing Glass at one point), an audience member asked Glass how he got started in music.
Glass replied that he started "getting serious" about playing music around age 8, when he started wondering where music came from. He thought that if he played and composed a lot, he could find out.
Decades later, he still didn't know where it came from, but started wondering what music is. He said that without thinking about it, an answer popped out of his mouth the other day: music is a place, a place like St. Louis or Chicago. It's a place that, once you've been there, you want to go back all the time.
As a programmer and music lover, his comment resonated with me.
Music and Software
I'm far from alone in feeling music and software (not to mention math) to be intimately related. We write software, a time-sequenced set of instructions, that a computer later "performs." We write a score, a music program, a time-sequenced set of instructions, that musicians or a computer later perform. While music appeals more to the emotions and software to our thinking, both are abstract, mathematically precise, abstract representations that human beings can create.
Donald Knuth, for example, is one of the deep greats of modern software, author of the multi-volume Art of Computer Programming. Here is one of the instruments in the music room of his house.
While Knuth "executes" many "music programs" like this (the main theme of Bach's Art of the Fugue):
on his pipe organ, he reads and writes many computer programs like this
in the rest of his life.
Software is in a Place
Software is in an abstract, conceptual space that I can't see with my eyes, but which I experience visually as a place. When thinking about Glass' comment about music, I remembered describing some software in a small group. While describing it, it was present to me in the space between us. I used my hands to indicate where a proxy server was, in front of two back ends, which I indicated, one with each hand. I reached out to show where a browser was, pulling my hand in to where I had shown the proxy to be as the request came in, and then showing how the request could be passed on to either or both back ends. I was seeing everything static (code waiting to be executed) and dynamic (data flowing through blocks of code) happening at a place in space.
All my thinking about software is highly visual in this way.
Conclusion
Music and Software are intimately related. They touch a lot of the same things in us. While I can't say just where it is, I think that software, like music, is in a place -- a place not too far from the place where music is. They are places I've spent a lot of time, and they feel comfortable.
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