When I read the question for this week, I immediately thought back to the encoding challenge. Our group was working on the code during reading week, and it would have been a great inconvenience to try to meet and code together. Therefore we decided that each of us will tinker with the code on our own and then post the resulting (and hopefully well-formed) code on a Googledoc which we created and shared. The next person would then take the code from the Googledoc, tinker with it some more, and paste the changed code back. Since, as you all know by now, coding is an incremental sort of activity where you go back and forth from the original text to the code and back again, there was a lot of posting and re-posting of code in the Googledoc. I soon began to notice that the spaces between the lines seem to increase. And, in fact, every time I would copy and paste the code from the Googledoc into Oxygen, what looked like a one-line space turned into two blank lines. Copying and pasting the code from Oxygen to Googledoc and back increased the number of spaces yet again. Eventually, I had to sit and delete empty lines from the code so that it would look better (and, in all honesty, I wondered if all the blank lines might be a problem in some unknown way). It took me a full 20 minutes to delete and rearrange everything in the proper way. What a mess!
I presume that what happened is that Google has some extra code that got transferred into the Oxygen program along with the visible characters, turning each blank line into two. We saw that in class when Prof. Galey was showing us the mess that is Microsoft Word. For whatever reason, though, our group didn't think of that problem when we were planning our collaboration (here's formal materiality in action!), and when we realized what was going on, it was too late - we had a mess of blank spaces on our hands. I guess it's a good thing that it didn't do more than just increase the number of empty lines... I hope...
I presume that what happened is that Google has some extra code that got transferred into the Oxygen program along with the visible characters, turning each blank line into two. We saw that in class when Prof. Galey was showing us the mess that is Microsoft Word. For whatever reason, though, our group didn't think of that problem when we were planning our collaboration (here's formal materiality in action!), and when we realized what was going on, it was too late - we had a mess of blank spaces on our hands. I guess it's a good thing that it didn't do more than just increase the number of empty lines... I hope...
Polina, I love this retelling of coding-by-committee.
ReplyDeleteI have to admit that any coding project I have ever done has been the summation of individual efforts. This is possible through the separation of the software into independent modules with the input and output globally specified within the project. A sort of, you-do-yours and I'll-do-mine philosophy.
This project was the first where I had to code by committee and it was an eye opening experience. One that helped me to appreciate the valuable insight of others as we worked through the challenge. However, it also reminded me that I, like you, am obsessed with managing whitespace.
I think that even that example, the managing of whitespace, troubles the container/context model. Surely the whitespace should be irrelevant, it is the typification of nothingness. The compiler ignores it. Yet we as people have a meaningful relationship with whitespace that enables us to make meaning from the content. It's the whole reason we don't write in scriptio continua anymore.