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These days, computer programmers are often called developers, and the richness of that word has set me thinking.

I recently read a discussion at Slashdot that became a free-for-all about what qualified as a true computer-programming language. Though the conversation was occasionally interesting on technical, linguistic, and even moral grounds, it also got me thinking about the term programmer and its near synonym, developer.

In case you haven't heard this, most "computer programmers" actually call themselves "developers" these days. Why is that? My guess is that the word programming has too many connotations of rigidness, authoritarianism, and brainwashing. Developers are half engineer, it's true — but the other half is artist, and programming definitely doesn't sound like the creative, open-ended process it really is. (By the way, there's history behind those connotations of authority and law: the English word comes from the Latin programma, a legal proclamation or edict.)

So where does develop come from? It's no accident that it sounds like envelope: they're complementary opposites. While to envelop something is to fold or wrap it up, to develop something is to unfold it — and by extention, to "bring out all that is potentially contained [with]in" (as the OED puts it). This is an appealing idea for developers, whose aesthetic is one of economical elegance, seeing how much they can get out of the givens. And the connotations of progress, of multiplying your efforts, of making something bear all the fruit it can, of turning the latent into the real — all these appeal to the programmer's engineer and artist sides alike.

What's slightly strange about this way of reading the word develop is how it relates to pure creativity. That is, in its "unfolding" sense develop seems akin to the uncreative (however adventurous) word discover, with which we denote the finding of something that already exists. Even if a discovery is wondrous, it's not a creative act in itself. In contrast, to invent something is to bring it out of thin air. In that sense, computer development is much more like invention than discovery.

Or is there a way in which developers sense themselves to be like poets, who often speak of "finding" the right word? It's true that poets are etymologically speaking "makers," not finders. But are there possibilities in the languages we work with (whether mother tongues or machines') that lie there under the surface, merely waiting to be turned loose?

first published Jun 28, 2004