I'm enjoying the introduction to the book Language and the Rise of the Algorithm by Jeffey Binder, especially in the context of watching Amy Ko's "Searching for Justice in Programming Language Design" linked above. Her approach seems to have a lot more in common with Leibniz et al than I was expecting, in terms of addressing the political and social contexts of symbols. It isn't open access, but you can download it from a shadow library if you want.

Thank you for sharing her talk! It is something I needed to hear this morning - grateful for work that engages with the flawed social contexts of CS in a nuanced and sympathetic way. Binder's STS project has got a cogent description of Leibniz's notations as an early upstream of blackboard cultures, like maths and CS (i.e. the refuge of constructive mathematics).

This algebraic sense of algorithm [...] placed the idea in an intimate relation to the development of new symbolic notations.

Another useful downstream of STS (by way of Susan Leigh Star's reading of symbolic notations as boundary objects) might be Ribes' "The logic of domains". With his lens, I'd read Ko's description of CS as having the useful domain-like characteristic of normalizing / abstracting problems, but also an unfortunate tendency of neutralizing / colonizing other domains. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0306312719849709

Thanks @Jasmine Otto, very grateful for STS perspectives as it's all pretty new to me. I did work with an STS scholar Annapurna Mamidipudi on a previous project and every conversation blew my mind! From the perspective of that project (which was about ancient weaving) Binder's book looks very Euro-centric, and seems to ignore the use of algorithms in the much longer history of craft.