The New River

Journal of Electronic Literature and Digital Art

“Handling Errors”

By Kimberly Lyle

Installation image of Handling Errors. It shows five transparent plaques with headphones beside them.

During my first time taking a programming class, I learned about a set of functions that exist to handle errors. Their purpose is to anticipate, detect, and resolve application and communication errors and prevent the program from crashing.

In this way, the language can never fail. But, what does it mean if a language is not allowed to have any errors? If there is no room for misinterpretation or gaps in meaning?

In response, I translated the coding vocabulary of error handling into spoken language. Myself and another person communicate limiting ourselves to the list of ‘error handling’ vocabulary for several different programming languages.

We use words meant to prevent errors in a machine language to undoubtedly cause them in a human one.

Three lists of words for each coding language

To experience this piece, please listen to the five audio files below

1. Swift Conversation

2. Python Conversation

3.  Ruby Conversation

4. Ada Conversation

5. Bash Conversation

 

Image with one of the coded language 'poems'