Expression

I remember how, a few years into our marriage, the strangest remark would occasionally be made to us: "You look so much alike!" I found this astonishing because I thought of Carol as a beautiful woman and utterly unlike me in appearance. And yet, as time passed, I started to see how there was something in her gaze, something about how she looked out at the world, that reminded me of my own gaze, of my own attitude about the world. I decided that the "resemblance" our friends saw wasn't located in the anatomy of our faces; rather, it was as if something of our souls was projected outwards and was perceptible as a highly abstract feature of our expressions. I could see it most clearly in certain photos of us together.

There was a time when owning digital space seemed thrilling, and our personal sites motivated us to express ourselves. There are signs of a resurgence, but too few wish to make their digital house a home.

Idiolect is an individual's unique use of language, including speech. This unique usage encompasses vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation.

An idiolect is the variety of language unique to an individual. This differs from a dialect, a common set of linguistic characteristics shared among a group of people.

The inevitable reciprocation that occurs between the act of drawing and the thinking associated with it. The hand moves, the mind becomes engaged, and vice versa. We might ask: How much does the medium of expression actually constrain a design process?

A medium has a way of constraining our choices, and this influence may not involve conscious choice at all. The planner, in the end, sees and understands only those things for which they can provide expression.

Websites are the most expressive medium I know, but they’re used today in such a tiny narrow way.

The thing is, they could be like digital paper: back-of-napkin notes, moodboards, journaling, letters, toy apps, lists, sprawling canvases.

Something with the ease of paper, but the expressiveness and capabilities of software.

I'm going to tell you how to write a program. It is a specific program; that is, a program with a specific structure and capabilities. In particular, it is a program that can be expanded from simple to complex along a well defined path, to handle a wide range of problems, likewise varying from simple to complex. One of the problems it considers is exactly the problem of complexity. How can you control your program so that it doesn't grow more complicated than your application warrants?

First I'll define "input", and mention some general rules of programming that apply to all programs, whether they have input or not. Actually we will be almost exclusively concerned with input, so I've not much to say about programs lacking input.

By admitting input, a program acquires a control language by which a user can guide the program through a maze of possibilities. Naturally, this increases the flexibility of the program, it also requires a more complex application to justify it. However it is possible to achieve a considerable simplification of the program, by recognising that it needs a control language as a tool of implementation.

The next step is a problem-oriented-language. By permitting the program to dynamically modify its control language, we mark a qualitative change in capability. We also change our attention from the program to the language it implements. This is an important, and dangerous, diversion. For it's easy to lose sight of the problem amidst the beauty of the solution.

In a sense, our program has evolved into a meta-language, which describes a language we apply to the application. But having mentioned meta-language, I want to explain why I won't use the term again. You see things get pretty complicated, particularly on a philosophic level. To precisely describe our situation requires not 2 levels of language - language and meta-language - but a least 4 levels. To distinguish between these levels requires subtle arguments that promote not clarity but confusion. Moreover, the various levels can often be interchanged in practice, which reduces the philosophic arguments to hair-splitting.

A problem-oriented-language can express any problem I've encountered. And remember, we're not concerned with the language, but with the program that makes the language work. By modifying the language we can apply the same program to many applications. However there are a class of extensions to the language that constitute another qualitative change. They don't increase the capacity of the program, but the increase the capability of the language. That is, they make the language more expressive. We will consider some such extensions in Chapter 8. I gathered them together chiefly because they share the common property that I don't quite comprehend their potential. For example, I think the language applies the concepts of English.

Finally, I want to describe a process whereby you can implement this program in machine language. That is, a bootstrap technique whereby a basic program can modify and expand itself.

When someone expends the least amount of motion on a given action, that's grace. You tend to expend too much... Color and expressivity in nature descriptions are achieved through simplicity along, through simple phrases like 'the sun sets', 'it grows dark', 'it began to rain'.

I don’t hate dialogue. I am not inspired by scenes that are overwritten with dialogue — that’s the truth — and I’m talking about my own work.

Of course, a lot of directors are brilliant dialogists, and there’s a lot of strong movies that are filled with great dialogue. But if I think about my own work, it’s [ideal] for me as a filmmaker to try to avoid the use of dialogue as much as possible. I think dialogue is the tool of expression for theatre, and then it became, for other reasons, one for television.

I will say: in a perfect world, you should use dialogue only when there are no other resources […] It should be the last resort — that’s what I’m saying. When I say “I hate dialogue,” it’s not true. I don’t. But it’s true that I feel, myself as a film director, uninspired when I read 500 pages of dialogue. For me, it’s boring.

This was supposed to be a platform for writers, which is to say individuals who think things through by themselves, and then share the results of this solitary process in all their ambiguity and uncertainty. Writers don’t speak statementese. If Substack were to extend its content-moderation policy beyond the porn and spam accounts, I would recommend starting not with the cornball basement-dwellers with swastikas in their banners, but with the pseudo-writers who don’t understand how completely incompatible statementese is with the writerly vocation, and who attempt to sneak on here using that debased artificial language.

There was a germ of something there. And it’s the same thing that causes people to want to be poets instead of bankers. I think that’s a wonderful thing, and I think that same spirit can be put into products, and those products can be manufactured and given to people and they can sense that spirit. If you talk to people that use the Macintosh, they love it. I mean you don’t hear people loving products very often. But you could feel it, there was something really wonderful there.

So I don’t think that most of the really best people that I’ve worked with have worked with computers for the sake of working with computers. They work with computers because they are the medium that is best capable of transmitting some feeling that you have that you want to share with other people. And before they invented these things, all these people would have done other things. But computers were invented, and they did come along, and all these people did get interested in them, either in school or before school, and said “Hey, this is the medium that I think I can say something in."