Hackers On Planet Earth

Lingua Machina: The Last Humans Who Read Code

Anna Nicanorova

We treat code as pure instruction, something you write so a machine will obey. Programming languages are closer to a living vernacular, riddled with idiom, accent, ambiguity, and taste, sitting somewhere between human language and musical notation. This talk covers the linguistics of computer languages: how languages were invented, argued over, and mutated; how grammar became structure; how we keep accelerating the pace at which we talk to machines in search of better ways to build. And as the history of computer linguistics will be covered, it is also worth reviewing the uncomfortable question for an age of generated code: as fewer of us write it by hand, will we still read it, understand it, and know why we write it the way we do?

Friday 1300 Gramercy Park Suite

Anna Nicanorova is a creative technologist. Across a career in advertising technology, she has worked at both extremes: the at-scale systems that had to run like a factory, deployed globally across hundreds of markets and the experimental lab that produced the prototypes nobody had built yet. Most of her work is the business of making messy data legible and useful. Prototypes built under her direction have been covered by CNBC, AdWeek, MediaPost, and Ad Age.