I'm becoming interested in the idea of "programming tools as art", and as a consequence I'm interested in programming tools criticism. I'd like to read/watch/hear critical reviews of programming tools that approach them not as bundles of features and capabilities, but as authored works that reflect a creative intent and as cultural touchstones and as environments or artifacts within which one can have deeply personal experiences. A. Do you share my interest? B. Do you know any such critics?

Critical code studies might be adjacent? https://wg.criticalcodestudies.com/

I’ve got (excerpts from) an art history book we could read on the topic. This is something I’m super interested in as well. I think there is actually quite a lot we should learn from art history/criticism if we are going to accomplish it

I'm a bit unsure what's meant by art criticism here. Is it something like music or restaurant reviews, or something more 'art world'? I'm also unsure about the switching between the term 'tools' and 'environments' which seem different kinds of things

Yes, music/movie/game reviews — the sort where someone describes their subjective experience of a work as a way of assessing it on behalf of the audience. I enjoy reading reviews, especially multiple reviews for the same work that disagree wildly, especially reviews that zoom in to critique tiny details and decisions and zoom out to situate the work within a movement or cultural moment. I usually think of programming tools as being environments because I don't separate the experience of the language from the editor. My experience comes from the interplay of both. Writing TS in VSCode is a different experience from writing TS in Nova or HTML in VSCode. (Edit: on second thought, I don't think this pertains to my meaning in the original post. Will have to come back to that later.) Does that help? I'm fumbling around in the dark a bit, so apologies if this is coming across more obtuse than it ought to. I think the idea is pretty small.

I’d say that art criticism goes a bit beyond reviews. A large amount of it is about understanding the work. Putting it in context, asking what its goals are, understanding why it approached things the way it did. It is a process of understanding as much as it is appraising.

Yeah, though I feel like we already have some of that. More would be nice. But I don't think I've ever read a magazine-style honest to goodness review of a PL, and I'm wondering why. Like, does Haskell get a 5/10 or a 3/10, and why? (From a given reviewer) Anyone who feels like this is absurd: yes! Lean into that.

I can see why you’d say we have explanations. But they aren’t the kind I’m looking for. We have all sorts of reviews like that. They are just called “why we are leaving x” or “why we chose y”. Example: https://journal.infinitenegativeutility.com/leaving-haskell-behind

That's a good point of comparison. Not quite the right thing, but certainly in the ballpark. It's missing the "this is a review of X" framing / artifice.

I’ll make some for you :)

For the "Programming Unenthusiast" magazine I'm totally not starting? (PRUNE)

Yes makes sense! So you agree it is helpful to think of both languages and editors as environments, or together forming an environment, rather than tools?

@Ivan Reese many Logo books expounded at length on the Logo philosophy of education and the ways that the design of the Logo programming language reflected and supported that philosophy. Mindstorms by Seymour Papert and Apple Logo by Harold Abelson are good examples of this. Abelson wrote the book decades before he sold his soul to whitewash MITs culpability in the death of Aaron Swartz, and it is a very good book, so when I read it I try to believe that the author was a good man when he was writing it.

Maybe thinking about this as auto-ethnography is useful @Ivan Reese? e.g. https://users.sussex.ac.uk/~thm21/thor/pdfs/Magnusson_Confessions11.pdf

shared this on masto but will share here too. Shane's post about his experience of using arroost was really special to me - https://edibotopic.com/blog/doing/leisure-sick/

The Art of Unix Programming has "art" in the name but more as "art not science", not literally as "art criticism". Nevertheless, it has quite a lot of opinionated deconstruction of what makes various things work well (or not), and more importantly work well together. "_things_" here being broader than strictly "tools", also of conventions/formats/protocols and such... So no not quite what you asked, but a step in roughly that direction(?) (I had related memories of The Unix Programming Environment but leafing through it again, it has much less subjective/philosophical content than I thought. Some short reflections at end of each chapter. It did somehow convey the "Unix way" but more by demonstration & osmosis than by explicitly talking of it?)

I tried to make one "I went to an algorave and it changed me forever." https://www.todepond.com/wikiblogarden/scrappy-fiddles/sharing/normalising/live/