[As posted to the ATTW 2008 proposal submission site, 14 November 2008.]


Short Description
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Programmers must address two audiences: the machine, and human
readers, namely programmers themselves. I trace some of the attempts
the programming discipline has made to reach human readers, and
discuss how this trend suggests programmers could benefit from
studying technical writing.


Proposal
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Programming languages address two radically different audiences:
programs (interpreters and compilers) and programmers. Clay Spinuzzi
has noted the striking and useful connections between paralogic
rhetoric and theories of how programmers understand programming
languages and source code, and notes that we can see programming as a
form of writing.

I'd like to take that idea further and consider programming
specifically as technical writing. I'll briefly trace the history of
addressing a human audience in programs, from early human-readable
programming languages (e.g. assembly language), to the incorporation
of pieces of natural-language syntax (such as COBOL), the increasing
sophistication of in-code comments, in-code documentation markup
(Javadoc, etc.), and finally literate programming and similar
proposals.

This trend has often been seen as turning programmers into basic tech
writers. But it also suggests that programmers can profit from
studying technical writing, and raises interesting questions about
technical writers who are also programmers.

The presentation will be extensively illustrated with samples of
production code and other relevant examples.