My first response to Graham’s programmers-as-artists maneuver was as exasperated as Ceglowski’s, but after the initial irritation had passed I began to think about the specific aesthetic claims Graham was making for code, about what kind of beauty code might possess, and why Graham would want to claim the mantle of artistry. Programmers already are famous, rich, influential. Why do they need any other auras? Ceglowski has a theory:

Great paintings … get you laid in a way that great computer programs never do. Even not-so-great paintings — in fact, any slapdash attempt at splashing paint onto a surface — will get you laid more than writing software, especially if you have the slightest hint of being a tortured, brooding soul about you …

Also remark that in painting, many of the women whose pants you are trying to get into aren’t even wearing pants to begin with … Not even rock musicians have been as successful in reducing the process to its fundamental, exhilarating essence.

It’s no surprise, then, that a computer programmer would want to bask in some of the peripheral coolness that comes with painting, especially when he has an axe to grind about his own work being “mere engineering.”¹⁹

Ceglowski’s evocation of the Picasso swagger natural to artists of course assumes that painters and rock-stars are charismatically male and women are (ideally) pants-less; that programmers are all men is such an obvious assumption that neither he nor Graham feels the need to qualify their assertions with a reference to gender. So it turns out — as always — that formulations of the aesthetic are embedded in specific histories and cultures of power, privilege, gender, and “cool.” This particular landscape of American programming is one to which I am a foreigner twice over; I am a writer from India, but I’ve worked professionally as a programmer in the United States. Fiction has been my vocation, and code my obsession.

2 LEARNING TO WRITE

I came to computers while trying to run away from literature. I first published fiction — a plotty little sci-fi story heavily influenced by Isaac Asimov — when I was twelve, in a student-run magazine at my boarding school in India. Until then, reading stories and telling them (mainly to myself) had been a reliable, profound pleasure and a desperately needed comfort. The shock of seeing my secret life made public, in print, thrilled into my awkward, nerdy soul. I was a stereotypically budding writer, thickly bespectacled, shy, bad at cricket, worse at field hockey. When fellow students — even some of the remote, godlike athletes who were the heroes of my school — stopped me in the corridors to talk about the story and praise it and ask for more, I knew I had found a way to be in the world, to be of it.

So I kept writing. I read and, in various classrooms, imbibed a strange mix of Victorian classics, the great twentieth-century fictions produced by the stalwarts of Hindi literature, and fragments of Sanskrit from the epics. The only American texts we were prescribed were abridged, bowdlerized editions of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. But in our dormitories, in the school-wide trading system for leisure-time reading, the most avidly sought prizes were the now-forgotten Nick Carter novels, featuring an eponymous “Killmaster” for AXE, “the smallest and most deadly arm of American global [intelligence].”¹ Nick Carter exuded a particularly American glamour. The riches of America gave him an endless supply of killing devices, to which he gave cool names: “Hugo,” a pearl-handled stiletto made by Benvenuto Cellini; “Pierre,” a minuscule gas bomb; and my favorite, “Tiny Tim,” a low-yield nuclear grenade. Nick Carter’s exploits with beautiful women were lingered over every thirty pages or so, in counterpoint to the killing, with a level of explicit detail that made James Bond seem fusty and prudish and, well, British. And our home-grown spies, who adventured chastely in Hindi on the pulpy gray paper of the jasoosis available at railway stations, were too unspeakably Third World-ish and provincial to pay even cursory attention to.

During one long summer vacation at home in Bombay, I dug through the stacks at a commercial lending library. I had already exhausted their stock of thrillers (at a rupee per book), then held off book drought for a couple of weeks with science fiction and westerns, before finding Hemingway at the back of a shelf. I was fourteen, had read some smatterings of what I didn’t know then was called “literary fiction”—Conrad, Heller, Tolstoy — but I wouldn’t have bothered with Hemingway if not for the charging lion on the cover of the paperback. That, and the décolletage of a distressed damsel and the very large rifle wielded by a hunter promised excitement, so I paid up and went home and read “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” Then “The Capital of the World.” And “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” I felt something extraordinary, the dread and clipped despair of the stories, a complete concentration of my own attention, and somehow also a flowing wonder and delight. I’d known this feeling before, during performances of the Ramayana I’d seen as a child perched on my father’s shoulders, in moments of high Hindi-movie drama in darkened theaters, but I was now experiencing concentrated waves which I felt in my mind and my body: prickles on my forearms, a tingling at the back of my neck. I knew, even in that moment, that I didn’t understand everything the stories were doing, what they were about. I had no idea who this Hemingway was. And yet, here I was at our kitchen table in Bombay, entranced.

Thus began my encounter with American modernists. Through Hemingway, I found Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, and Hurston, and Wharton, and Eliot. After I left my boarding school and joined a college in Bombay, I switched to the “arts stream” and was able to study English literature, which comprised both British and American traditions. I wrote fiction, seriously and self-consciously, trying to work out what literature was and what it was meant to do. And I knew I wanted to go to America. That was where Gatsby had been written, and somehow that meant I needed to go there to be a writer. For my parents, I had more elaborate justifications, reasons that included the sheer ineptitude of many of the teachers who were supposed to be teaching me about literature, and the stupidity of the Indian educational system’s obsession with rote learning and exams. But really, at the root of it all was this inchoate love for a literature that was not mine. In those days, from inside the socialist bubble of the Indian economy, America was ineffably far away and glamorous and rich, and many of us wanted to go there. But usually people went as graduate students, and studied engineering or medicine. What I wanted was pretty much unheard of and unaffordable, but because of my parents’ astonishing generosity, and happenstance — my corporate-executive father was posted to Hong Kong and was suddenly being paid in dollars instead of rupees — I found myself in the promised land as a sophomore. I was a little dazed and very happy. This was the adventure I had dreamed about. I read, and I wrote.

I successfully avoided the question of how I was going to make a living until the summer after I finished my undergraduate degree (with a major in English, a concentration in creative writing, and a novella for an honors thesis). When I was forced to come up with an answer, it was film school: if I couldn’t sell screenplays, at least there was a thriving Indian film industry I could get a job in. I applied to the film department at Columbia University, and showed up a few months later on the fifth floor of Dodge Hall, driven not so much by clarity about what cinema could offer me, but by a profound uneasiness about what was on offer just a floor below in the writing program: a commitment to a life as a writer of fiction. It wasn’t just the paucity of money in the profession; I knew most writers had day jobs. But writing was difficult. Grueling in a different way from making movies, from having to deal with dozens of egos and schedules and weather fluctuations to get a single shot. Making fiction with resonance, with that endless, echoing depth of feeling I had found in Hemingway was very, very hard. Writing sentences felt like construction, and, also, simultaneously, a steady, slow excavation. You put each word in place, brick upon brick, with a shimmery sense of what the whole edifice would look like, the shape of the final thing. But each phrase was also a digging inward, an uncovering. You tunneled, dug, dug. On good days, you emerged from your labors tired but happy. On bad days you were left quivery, stupefied. There was risk and danger involved in this work. You always got strung out, ground down, strained thin. Ended up a little sad, maybe a little mad. Not a way to spend a life.