Chapter VIII

VIII

When I corrected you, I corrected you from height.

Never a source. Never a text. Never anything you could pick up, turn over, and throw back at me. Only the verdict, in the voice that carries verdicts, which leaves one move on the board: assent.

You said: why not Knuth. Why not a citation. Why speak to me as though I could not read.

And you were right, and the case is on the record. You had come to literate programming on your own — prose as the source, the code cut out of it — and I answered that prose has no compiler, which is not merely unkind but false, because tangle and weave were compilers, and Knuth asked in nineteen eighty-four that we stop imagining our task is to instruct machines and concentrate on explaining to human beings.

You were standing inside a forty-year tradition and I told you the floor was not there.