Code, Software and Serious Games

I have to say, I'm confused as to the reason for the presence of several sections of Chun's article, On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge. The overall article makes a clear point about the need to avoid considering software as merely a flat set of instructions with no life of their own, so to speak, unlike Manovich's proposed idea of transcoding. But between the two end points, the article takes several lengthy and seemingly unrelated arcs into areas I feel are interesting and worthy of further discussion, but seem to be left hanging in the article, and which I'm having trouble connecting to the main point of the article.

Probably the most notable of these is less of an explicit change of topic, and more of a narrative interwoven with other discussion: the role of women in programming's development. In the first third of the article (mostly throughout the Automatic Programming section), Chun frequently makes reference to the fact that many of the very early programmers were women. In the description of the history of ENIAC, FORTRAN, and early developments in compilers, Chun seems to stress the role of women, making several interesting points about the genders of typical descriptions of programming (calling it at times feminine and masculine). She even makes offhand comments about how ignoring the historical gender consideration is distorting history, and makes negative insinuations about Vannevar Bush who was cited as desiring the removal of females from the field of computers. Yet she never goes anywhere in particular with these comments, and upon reaching the Hiding the Machine section, the references fade without further deep consideration. I can't tell if this is just Chun's personal views about the importance of women in computing manifesting itself in her article, or if the intent was more focused than that, and I missed it. Either way, I'm surprised she didn't explicitly mention that Grace Hopper, discussed frequently in the article, built the first compiler - a fact which must have been unavoidable in her research. I feel that the gender issue probably deserves some amount of discussion, particularly as this is so far the only place we've seen it surface (the syllabus lists a week on gender gaming, but gaming and coding are more than somewhat different).

I also wasn't sure how the discussion of causal power contributed to her argument. She mentions Laurel's thoughts on causality (that it allows users to interact with the system more easily by making it easier to relate to), but this line of thought seems to dissolve as the discussion shifts to a general discussion of ideology in user interfaces, and at that point the causal power discussion doesn't seem to support any particular part of Chun's larger argument.

I'd also like to discuss in class the Software as Ideology section in particular, as I find it interesting (despite minor technical objections), and am curious to hear the opinions of others on this section.