Thomas Hobbes viewed society as a meta-person, a gigantic creature whose parts were human and which was in the service of those humans. Left to their own devices, people would not work well together as their notion of individualism and search for personal gain leads directly to conflict: strong government is needed to instil a sense of cooperation and of social obligation. This idea of “government through social contract” is pervasive in Western political thought, being the basis as it is for the “government of the people, by the people, for the people” with which Abraham Lincoln hoped to lead post-civil war America.
Software systems themselves can also be thought of as Leviathans. From a purely technical sense, all of “professional” software construction is based on notions of composition, of software systems that are themselves made of software systems. So we have structured or procedural programming, with routines composed of subroutines. And functional programming, with functions composed of functions. And object-oriented programming, with objects composed of objects. So central are these ideas to expressions of thought in software that they are considered paradigmatic by many, representing fundamental world-views of the art/craft/science.
There’s a second formulation of software-as-Leviathan, which is closer to Hobbesian meaning. The technical aspect of our software systems is merely a substrate[*] through which a social system—that of the people interacting with the software, the people acting on the software, and the people interacting with the other people—is reified. So the descriptions Hobbes made of his Leviathan can be made of these socio-technical systems:
- First the Matter thereof, and the Artificer; both which is Man[sic].
- Secondly, How, and by what Covenants it is made; what are the Rights and just Power or Authority of a Soveraigne; and what it is that Preserveth and Dissolveth it.
- Thirdly, what is a Christian Common-Wealth.
- Lastly, what is the Kingdome of Darkness.
[*] I wonder what form of substance gives the best sense of the analogy. Scaffolding? Lubricant? Mortar? Framework?
OK, maybe not so much the third one, except that it is really an attempt to define the values and norms of a society, which in the context of Hobbes’s writing, meant a Christian society.
Of course, any attempt to describe such a system is going to be filtered by the preconceptions, ideas and values of the person creating the description. Which brings me onto today’s topic: the pun in the new domain of this blog. Evidently it’s a contraction of “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programmers”, based on the Abelson and Sussman book title. That book is abbreviated to SICP, so it’s not too difficult to see how it might be adapted to SICPers.
We can also see it as being a Latin abbreviation: sic pers., meaning such a person. So there is both the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programmers, and there is this person who is doing the interpreting, in the domain name.
