I've now listened to all four episodes of Tom Stuart's podcast Why Are Computers. They're very good. I don't understand most of them because they're very computers. Very computers. But I still listen because I like the way computer people write and talk (some computer people, not all computer people.)
There's a precision and care to the language I really enjoy.
There's a passage about Civil Service language in Joe Moran's book about shyness:
"When the Times journalist Michael McCarthy shadowed the Department of the Environment in the late 1980s, he found that civil servants were still using this esoteric code. Its key quality, he felt, was ‘dynamic understatement’. Words that might seem bland to the uninitiated became charged with meaning if you were gentlemanly enough to be able to decode them. Hence the highest accolade was to say that something was ‘rather impressive’, but woe betide the official whose contributions were regarded as ‘unhelpful’ or ‘unfortunate’ or, on rare and heinous occasions, ‘most unfortunate’. Even today, senior civil servants deploy a variant of this evasive vocabulary, with its suggestion that excessive keenness or candour is rather gauche and undignified. ‘I am reluctant to support’, ‘I haven’t formed a view yet’ and ‘I am happy to discuss’ all signify dissent, while ‘I’m open to this line of thinking’ means ‘yes’"
The computer talk I like is like that, but not as evil. It understates things, or, rather, takes care to state them with carefully delineated upper and lower boundaries. There's a suspicion of hyperbole and false promises.
I also enjoy the way that regular English words are redeployed as technical expressions, occasionally yielding such lovely ideas as a 'self-avoiding walk'. I go on those a lot.
And Tom is a really good interviewer. Just does enough to lead the conversation, but knows when to shut up. And he edits it well, keeping it interesting and rhythmic.
It all comes together in episode 4 which has all the tension and whathappensnextness of Serial but is about the self-enumerating pangram problem.
It's got more jeopardy than all ten seasons of Ice Road Truckers.
You should listen.