Happy Birthday to Me: Musings on Language and Code
Today, I find myself celebrating my birthday in the tranquil confines of a cozy Airbnb in Vancouver. It’s a momentary escape from the pressures of work, a rare breather amidst the ever-present demands of the office. Through the frost-touched window, I watch the Canadian flag battle the icy winds. Below, I can hear the faint murmurs of a French-speaking couple, my neighbors. A little later, the cadence of Mandarin reaches my ears, no doubt my landlord going about his day. And then, the phone rings. It’s my mother, calling from home, so naturally, the conversation begins in Bengali. When my father takes the phone, we switch seamlessly to Hindi. After the call, I set the phone down, open my laptop, and begin composing an email in English.
In the House of Commons of Great Britain, Edmund Burke once stated, “There were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important than them all.” As the 21st century dawned, we observed media houses displaying biases towards their respective lobbies. The ’truth,’ which should be absolute, now has shades of well-crafted absolution. “Whose truth is the truth?” is a question I often ask myself while reading news articles on the internet. With the government in power controlling the first three estates, it’s not an exaggeration to say that Orwell’s “1984” no longer seems like fiction. This blog explores the hypothetical “00 Estate” that encompasses all estates and dictates the terms for writing code.
A trainee undergoing military training can disassemble and assemble a machine gun within a minute. At first, this might seem very complex, but everyone in the academy manages to do it. The more pertinent question is not ‘how’ but ‘why’. It’s because their lives depend on it. Similarly, a disciplined programmer learns the vocabulary and syntax of a programming language with utmost sincerity. Every word in the programming language is sacred, and any non-conformance is akin to blasphemy.