This was Ramsey’s first teaching day. He spent some time going over what he had planned for his class called ‘Radical Computer Science’ and also went over his prior and current work. He studies the politics of code by focusing on the more meta stuff, like creating his own coding languages. He really helped me think about code in a way that the creator would by forcing us to understand the decisions that are made in writing a new language. He has created an arabic coding language as well as God.js, which I really enjoyed.

He ended his class by proposing an exercise where we had to code out an image of an iconic dance from this site. Someone acted as the computer (the interpreter) and someone acted as the programmer. We basically wrote out how to perform the dance for another student. I read mine out while Nathan performed. He did a great job and it was pretty funny. He danced Napoleon Dynamite’s Canned Heat.

As homework, Ramsey gave us the exercise of finding a piece we liked from the Twitter Great Art Bot and then designing a language to create the image we chose. I felt like I was just writing a bunch of functions, or even a library, than a language. It was hard for me to draw the line about where to make assumptions about what you can/can’t do. I don’t know if I’ve really wrapped my head around it yet…