My first reaction to programmer punning had been a certain curiosity. The reason for compulsive punning among computer people seemed interesting, ripe for study. Perhaps this would be my ticket to tenure, I thought. My time spent as a “quality-assurance engineer” would not be seen as falling away from academia but as … fieldwork! I would write papers. I would be invited to the next meeting of the Modern Language Association in San Francisco. There I would tell a learned but computer-illiterate audience how programmers had to work in the relentlessly literal language of code, where one slip of a letter reduced everything to incomprehensibility. The compiler, I would tell them, is a computer program that translates the programmer’s code into a set of instructions that can be executed by the microprocessor, the chip at the heart of the machine. The compiler is the entity the programmer must talk to, the creature he or she must make understand the intentions embodied in the code. But this compiler-creature is error-intolerant to a fault; it demands a degree of exactness that is exhausting, painful for an intelligent human being. Leave out a comma, and the compiler halts, affronted at the slightest whiff of error. Fix the comma, run the compiler again, then it halts again, this time at a typo. Puns, I would say, represented a human being’s pent-up need for ambiguity. That a word could signify two things at once! And these double meanings could be simultaneously understood! What a relief from the flat-line understanding of a programmer’s conversation with the machine!

As I made my way to my cubicle, I had one of the startled, queasy moments that sometimes came over me during my first years at Telligentsia. It was a feeling of displacement, the sense that I had landed in the middle of a newly forming planet where the laws of evolution were suddenly changed and unrecognizable. What was I doing surrounded by compulsive punners? By programmers who spent their time working in the cramped, stripped-down language of code? All around me, nothing but artificial languages: UNIX shell scripts and C programs and database queries asked in Structure Query Language—“impoverished languages” was the term I introduced to my students when I was a graduate teaching assistant. Artificial languages as poor human inventions stripped of history, usage, experience, connotation. All the dripping suggestiveness of language—gone. Around me an entirely new world was coming into being, and it was being made out of artificial, impoverished languages.

Oh, I should give it up, I knew. I was stuck in a nineteenth-century idea of the Real and the True, which I should confine to my journal writing and poetry scribbling. There I could indulge my tiresome need for the Essential and the Transcendent—for all those philosophical German words that began with capital letters—without bothering too many people about them. I’d been a student of James McCawley, the linguist who insisted on the study of meaning, not just syntax and structure. It had ruined my academic career, according to my dissertation advisor. “The future is in computational linguistics,” he’d insisted, by which he’d meant the math of words, the formalism of language, the deduction of elemental parts of speech, like atom-splitting. When done well, the advisor insisted, computational linguistics would eventually eliminate the difference between natural and artificial language. You won’t know if you’re talking to a human being or a program, and you won’t care. “You should go into computer speech-recognition research,” the advisor had advised.

I sat and gazed back at him as his yes-nods slowly came to a halt. Was that the purpose of those nods: to tell you how you must answer? For I saw there was no other reply I could make. I was supposed to say, Yes, I was done with it. That everything I’d cared about for the last ten years was a hopeless dead end. All those articles neatly listed on my résumé, all the talks at conferences, all the colloquia and symposia and everything else with Greek plural endings—over. The years I hung in there teaching the same course over and over, just to stay inside my profession somehow—why all that meant nothing, I was supposed to say, I was such a fool, what a waste. What was more, I was supposed to be grateful for the chance to leave it all behind, for a new start, even at the bottom.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m done. I suppose I’ve said everything I had to say on the subject anyway.” Then I laughed without meaning to. “You know, the world hasn’t exactly stopped in its tracks to listen to me.”

“When you’ve come from academia, every single thing here seems odd,” Wallis said. “Which particular type of ‘odd’ are you referring to?”

“How he wanted me to disown what I studied.”

“Oh, yes,” Wallis said. “The same thing happened to me at my first job. ‘Did your fieldwork in Borneo? Not much computing there, dear!’”

I should have left it there. It might have been more pleasant for me. “Still,” I said, “it was weird. I felt like he somehow wanted me to give up my Ph.D. To renounce it.”

Wallis slid the job offer across the table.

I put my hand on the paper, still warm from the laser printer. Stock options, sick leave, vacation, more money in a year than I’d ever earned in four. At the bottom was Wallis’s neat signature, and a blank line waiting for mine.

“Well,” she said, extending a pen, a fat black fountain pen, its gold point shining in the light. “Isn’t that rather what you’re about to do?”

It happened while I was in the middle of an argument with Bradley Thorne. I had come across a bug of his, some anomalous behavior in a window, nothing major, a level-three. “It’s not my bug! Not my bug!” he was shouting. “It says right here it is!” I responded, holding up the printout of the code. “Created by Bradley Thorne,” I read from the header. “Last mod Bradley Thorne.” He squinted at the listing. Mara Margolies was his primary tester, and I had watched her go through this countless times with him: his terrifying forgetfulness, as if he had never before laid eyes upon this code. Thorne was famous for his “code production,” lines of code written by the thousands, a prowess he had apparently achieved by not much bothering to remember what he’d typed. “This code can’t possibly be responsible for that window!” he was shouting. “It says right on the header it is!” I was shouting back. [...]