Matthew Kirschenbaum, on why humanities students should learn to program: The first program most people learn to write in any computer language is called Hello World. Its sole function is to display those two words on the screen. But the act of writing and then running Hello World can raise some intriguing questions: Who, or what, exactly, is saying hello to the world? The original author of the program? The neophyte who just transcribed it on a computer? The computer itself? All of these somehow together? Whose "world" is being greeted? The world around us, or the virtual world inside the machine? Is anyone (or anything) expected to return the salutation? Hello World, whose syntax varies from one computer language to another, is a postmodern cultural artifact, and to me such questions are irresistible.
From the archive, Alan Kay: If the children are being instructed in the pink plane, can we teach them to think in the blue plane and live in a pink-plane society?
From last year, David Lynch: Ideas are like fish. Originality is just the ideas you caught.
Hello Worlds | 
