In Chapter 4 of From Coding to Community, I discussed how open source software's struggle with usability can be understood, in part, as a conflict between the procedural tropes of iteration and abstraction. Today, Matt Asay blogged about another important aspect of this struggle: the free software movement's tendency to cling to purity with religious fervor.

I defended my thesis this week and will be finalizing it very soon, at which point I'll upload it here for public consumption, but I wanted to briefly think aloud about some of the questions that came up during my defense. This is not a fully developed post, but more of a kicking of the tires.

Over at gnovis, I just posted a book review of Johan Soderberg's "Hacking Capitalism: The Free and Open Source Software Movement, arguably the only full length book to bring NeoMarxist criticism to bear on the open source software movement. I highly recommend

A few moments ago I posted some thoughts on Ian Bogost's concept of procedural rhetoric, and whether it might be applied to programming languages. In this post, I'm going to dive right in to some examples.

User Distribution Types

Procedural rhetoric, as defined by Ian Bogost in In Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (MIT Press 2007), is "the practice of using processes persuasively." I'm setting out, in this post, to explore whether the concept of procedural rhetoric - which Bogost discusses primarily in relation to video games - can be abstracted and applied to programming languages themselves. More specifically, I'm interested in whether Bogost's work can be used to support my belief that certain programming languages, by design, argue in favor of Open Culture approaches.