Geeks and Writing: Let's Talk About the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Week 3)

Hello fellow Geeks!

I'm coming into this computer science course and program with a long-held and deep appreciation of the written word. I'm so appreciative of it that I'm hoping to major in both computer science and english during my undergraduate years. So this week's topic is both significant and perfect for me.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, for those that don't know, is a sci-fi classic about a universe filled with living beings and habitable planets outside of Earth. Actually Earth seemingly has nothing to do with the novel at all, largely because it gets blown up within the first 20 pages. The book is hilarious but more importantly, it somehow manages to intertwine the sciences and the humanities brilliantly. It talks about how philosophers would go out of business if science were to discover the meaning of life while making a deliberate point about how the meaning of life will remain as elusive within the confines of science as it continues to within philosophy. The novel introduces us to depressed robots, sassy AI's, misunderstood dolphins, and a blurred line between science and the arts like I've never read or seen before. Basically, I love this book.

But why I am talking about this here? Because I think the novel, and really the entire sci-fi genre, exemplifies how important it is that geeks learn to write so that we can take our pent-up creativity and imagination and let it loose, because its only through the imagination of geeks that we've gotten as far as we have with technology, that we've reached such impossible standards with machines and computers. You need an idea before you can program and the only way to get those ideas is through the outlet that writing can provide. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy presents improbabilities and impossibilities but it also presents inspiration for a future once unimaginable to us, now significantly more within our grasps. In other words, I refuse to believe that I will never have a pet Marvin and am now determined to make him myself if I have to.

There is, of course, a more practical reason to learn to communicate effectively and efficiently. As we're learning in class right now, there's a great deal of importance in being able to share our codes with other people. In order for people to use and appreciate our wonderful codes, they have to be able to understand our codes. The easiest way to do this is through the docstrings and design recipe that has been drilled into our brains. But if we can't write those docstrings with a certain level of clarity and specificness then no one will be able to understand us and our amazing codes will be useless to everyone but ourselves.

The blending of scientific imagination and artistic creativity is a deadly combination that can, as cheesy as this is, change the world. Our most famous artists are some of our most famous scientists, and that's no coincidence. Geeks need to learn to write, yes so they can communicate their ideas, but also to bring their ideas to life and imagine the unimaginable.

That's all from me this week!

So long, and thanks for all the fish.
- Anisha Rohra