There has been two intresting posts on Word Aligned about software documentation as a “genre” and more specifically humour in documentation. The first one was a review of the documentation litteracy ideas and was a quite interesting starting point. But I found the second post yet more interesting : it explores the link between this form of humour and the notion of “syntactic sugar” in programming… and it is very simple and well written, I recommend it.
Makes me think of another idea that I like: the fact that formal systems like programming languages or math proofs (any form of constructed, artificial language) can be used for other things than computing or calculating, for example things like jokes or poetry*, usually associated to natural languages (english, body lanuage, etc…).
To which, Possibly Philosophy answered :
They eventually resolved this self-reference, but Cantor’s ‘everything-in-the-fetish-book-twice’ parties finally sunk the idea.
* or music. Speaking of which: I like a lot the non-orthodox definition on the first line of the wikipedia article on serial music :
“a technique for composition that uses sets to describe musical elements, and allows the manipulation of those sets.”
there is an intresting Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on set theory for some background.