"Geek Sublime" by Vikram Chandra (Faber and Faber, 2014)

The author's written some very respectable novels and stories, but he was also a programmer and a computer consultant - a self-confessed geek. The blurb says "What is the relationship between the two? Is there such a thing as the sublime in code? Can we ascribe beauty to the craft of coding?" but only a small proportion of the book directly deals with that. He begins by pointing out some people's attempts to relate programs and arts

• According to Graham, the iterative processes of programming - write, debug (discover and remove bugs, which are coding errors, mistakes), rewrite, experiment, debug, rewrite - exactly duplicate the methods of artists (p.2)
• 'Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do' (Donald Knuth - literate programming)
• "Of all the different types of people I've known, hackers and painters are amongst the most like" (Paul Graham) (p.2)

He points out that US and Indian computer cultures are different

• In a 2013 interview, the executive chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, said, "Forty per cent of the startups in Silicon Valley are headed by India-based entrepreneurs" (p.75)
• This [Indian] educational process, with its obsessive emphasis on examinations and rankings, produces legions of rote learners, mark grubbers, and cheaters. It causes casualties - 7379 students committed suicide in 2010, at increate of 26 per cent over 2005 (p.77)
• the proportion of undergraduate computer-science degrees awarded to women in the US has declined from 37 per cent in 1984 to 18 per cent in 2010 ... Meanwhile, in India, the trend has gone in the other direction ... in 2003, 32 percent of the Bachelor of Engineering degrees in computer science and 55 per cent of the Bachelor of Science degrees in computer science were awarded to women (p.80)
• research in countries as varied as Iran, Hong Kong, Mauritius, Taiwan, and Malaysia has yielded results consistent who those found in studies in India, showing that there is nothing about the field of computing that makes it inherently male. Varma's conclusion is blunt: 'The gender imbalance in the United States seems to be specific to the country; is not a universal phenomenon (p.83)

He quotes some interesting facts about computer languages

• COBOL .. still processes 90 per cent of the planet's financial transactions, and 75 per cent of all business data (p.128)
• Malboge ... is so impenetrable that it took two years after the language was first released for the first working program to appear, and that program was not written by a human, but generated by a computerized search program that examined the space of all possible Malboge programs and winnowed out one possibility (p.130)
• The open-source database SQLite, at the time of this writing, has 1177 times the amount of test code as it does program code (p.155)

He deals with Indian theories of aesthetics

• It is the very artificiality and conventionality of the aesthetic experience, therefore, that makes the unique experience of rasa possible (p.150)
• The speech of the poet can be effective even when it doesn't obey the rules of everyday language. According to Abhinavagupta, even the denotative and connotative meanings are only aids to the production of rasa, unessential props which can sometimes be discarded (p.155)
• Indian movies mix emotions and formal devices in a manner quite foreign to Western filmgoers; Indian tragedies accommodate comedic scenes, and soldiers in gritty war movies can break into song ... This is why the Aristotelian unities of British and American films seemed so alien to me (p.161-2)
• Mary Douglas writes ... 'ring composition is extremely difficult for Westerners to recognise.' ... ... When I was writing my first book, I had never heard the phrase 'ring composition,' but the method and its specific implications and techniques came readily to hand because - of course - I had seen and heard it everywhere. What I wanted within the nested circles or chakras of my novel was a mutual interaction between various elements in the structure (p.165)
• Shulman writes that in India, reiterations and ring compositions 'speak to a notion of reality, in varying intensities and degrees of integrity, as resonance, reflection, or modular repetition understood as eruption or manifestation (avirbhava) from a deeper reservoir of existence' (p.167)

Then he gets into Indian metaphysics and Tantric practices, the role of woman in Indian culture, Sanskrit and the consequences of the Empire. Finally he returns to the literature/programming issue -

• programmers ... often seem convinced that they already know everything worth knowing about art ... to make art, you don't have to become an artist - that anyhow, is only a pose - you just analyse how art is produced, you understand its domain, and then you code art (p.209)
• For my own part, as a fiction writer who has programmed, thinking and feeling as an artist is a state of being utterly unlike that which arises when one is coding (p.210)
• To compare code to works of literature may point the programmer towards legibility and elegance, but it says nothing about the ability of code to materialize logic ... Most discussions of the beauty of code I have encountered emphasize formal qualities of language - simplicity, elegance, structure, flexibility ... But programs are not just algorithms as concepts or applied ideas; they are algorithms in motion. Code is uniquely kinetic. It acts and interacts with itself, with the world. In code, the mental and the material are one. Code moves. It changes the world (p.221)