TECHNOLOGY
Programming Language
The formal notation in which meaning is exhausted by operation — the Tractarian dream realized as engineering practice, and the communicative substrate of computing for seventy years.
A programming language is a notation in which every statement has precisely one meaning and precisely one effect. x = x + 1 does not mean different things depending on who writes it or what mood they are in. It increments a variable. The meaning is the operation. Nothing is left over. Read through Wittgenstein's framework, programming languages are the clearest realization of the dream of perfect language: a notation in which meaning is determined by form, in which saying and meaning have been collapsed into a single act. They worked beautifully for instructing machines. They failed at expressing human thought — and the failure, read precisely, is what makes the AI language moment philosophically consequential.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The history of programming languages is, from a Wittgensteinian perspective, the history of increasingly sophisticated attempts to narrow the gap between human intention and formal specification without ever crossing the fundamental line. Grace Hopper's A-0 compiler in 1952, FORTRAN in 1957, COBOL