What sorts of things does Wittgenstein say about language as a material or an object to reason about? Apart from “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.”

There are philosophical implications to Godel’s work because some of his results hold for all systems as powerful (or more powerful) than that of Principia Mathematica by Russell and Whitehead, for instance.

But it’s also important to note that, historically, even when the cutting edge mathematics of the day did not directly have philosophical implications, such as Newton’s system, it nonetheless was very influential in shaping the world views of the day.

A book I’d recommend strongly to you and any other poet-programmer is Martin Davis’s Engines of Logic. This looks at the life and work of Leibniz, Boole, Frege, Cantor, Hilbert, Godel, and Turing in how it developed computers. The biographical sketches are fascinating and it also is excellent in the ‘history of ideas’ mode. Davis is a renowned logician himself. And the emphasis is on the development of the language of symbolic logic as the crucial thing in computing.

Code while indeed deep, IMHO for today’s digital writers/poets can also be beautifully ‘bendy’ beyond just initial satirical initiations/ instantiations or general generative promise – potential for outmaneuvering oulipian considerations –unseen strings swapping, comments cooking, it invokes something bordering on the ‘computationally genetic.’ also perhaps inferring almost clinical ideas–colder sharper models of literary aesthetic possibly – which require additional branches like LOLCODE to root or ground them in nature, preserve some humanity in their exposed processes –kidder’s soul of the machine perhaps.

For me the attraction of developing such codes is something subversive – famously the MS guys who developed DirectX did so without any official sanction or approval – force feeding the technical cycles of S/W & H/W that moved PC game dev along its evolutionary trajectory. Ethical Hacking has become all the rage lately. I laugh when I hear engineering managers, PMs or lecturers instruct early stage programmers to ‘think outside the box’ – when it is apparent that they themselves have no idea how big the box actually is. “Try to think within several small boxes” might be better advice. Particularly in relation to stack pointers, registers etc..

Some recent fun stuff programmers themselves got up to: Songsincode see: http://www.wait-till-i.com/2009/08/21/wow-so-that-is-how-memes-happen-songsincode/

I still occasionally threaten to finish reading – an eternal Golden Braid – so I’m looking forward to your Gödel influenced last installment Joerg