Djangocon EU: body of knowledge - Daniele Procida¶
(One of my summaries of the 2026 Djangocon EU in Athens).
Athens! The thinking industry started here. Athens is often the origin if you follow ideas to the source.
Here also Socrates was found guilty (280-221) for “corrupting the youth” on trumped-up charges. Though… he made it is job to be a complete nuisance: exposing everyone’s hypocrisy and asking difficult questions. After the 280-221 vote he got to give a speech in reaction. After that, the vote on the actual punishment was 360-141 in favour of the death penalty. The speech must have been particularly irritating.
On to a different subject. He watched the recent launch of the NASA rocket that went to the moon. A marvel of technology. That was measured using body parts, being 322 feet tall. And the distance to the moon in miles. Why not the scientific meter and kilometer?
Plato already mentioned it. “Now take the acquisition of knowledge; is the body a hindrance or not, if one takes it into partnership to share an investigation”. And “when the soul tries to investigate anything with the help of the body, it is obviously led astray”.
0.098 km = 98 m = 98000 mm, a child can understand it. Pure rationality. But ask a Metric Martyr in the UK how many feet are in a mile and most of them won’t know.
The world seems to be divided in two camps:
Thinking, rationality, abstraction, unboundedness.
Bodies, materiality, tangibility, being rooted.
Wouldn’t Plato have loved a computer? Pure rationality, following its logic programming without fail?
What about those body-part-units? They’re not that weird actually. They’re rational Roman measurements:
A mile is 1000 Roman paces.
1 passus = 5 pedes (feet).
1/12 pes (feet) = 1 uncia (thus: inch).
(Note: according to the Greek, Romans are only good for stealing Greek ideas, building roads and killing people.)
On to another aspect. Why is Django’s documentation so good? Well, it has been prioritized from the start. It is complete, accurate, consistent, rational and well-structured: all Platonic values.
But Daniele also thinks the documentation is so good because it fits the human body.
The size has to be right. The limitations of our intelligence are the limits of our embodied intelligence. We can only grasp so much, mentally. A list can be too long. A page can be too long. If information is cut in too-small parts, you also can get into problems as you have to context-switch between pages too much. We tire mentally also because we tire physically.
The same applies to our body. Our hands and fingers can grasp objects. But it has to be of a certain size. Too big and we can’t grasp it. Too small and our fingers can’t pick it up.
We experience documentation in time and space. We move with it. How long have you been reading the Django documentation? “Where are you in the text?” We orient ourselves in text as if in a space or a building. We rely on the humanised rationality of structure. Sometimes you’re in a building and it is clear where you have to go and in other buildings you feel lost.
Django’s documentation is so good because of the quality of experience that it gives you. It is almost an embodied being that you can experience in space and time. Does it fit you? Do you notice it? The embodied nature of the work and intelligence that the Django community poured into the documentation?
Early Macintosh manuals had to explain new concepts and really tried to explain them in a human way. Scrolling being explained with help of an old book scroll, for instance. A floppy disk for storage as a floor plan of a building with a corridor and rooms.
Aldine Press (started 1494 in Venice) had a vision to print the old classics in a more accessible way. Books in the middle ages used to be big. And sometimes chained to the desk. Not really accessible. By printing them in smaller, lighter, more accessible formats, he wanted to make our “body of knowledge” more fitting to the human body.
You can see the bodily aspects of knowledge in our language:
Seizing/taking: grasp, comprehend, apprehend, perceive.
Measuring: ponder, weigh up, fathom.
Body movement: jumping to conclusions, intuitive leap, stumble/trip
Spatiality: understand, position
Mental space. When he asked a question of Russell Keith-Magee at a Django sprint, Russell would close his eyes and turn his eye inwards for a while. He would look at the Django codebase in his head and navigate it. Just like you yourself would navigate a city?
Being a programmer isn’t so different from being a human with a body in time and space. Look at questions you might have as a beginning programmer:
Which file or directory or window to be in.
Where to expect the output.
When to expect it.
Where to enter a command.
When to do something.
In what order to do things.
And then look at an experienced programmer. They seem to know where they are. They know their way around. They can move smoothly.
Closing comment: there are some uncanny features in software nowadays. As a human, we are used to having limits. But nowadays we have infinite scrolling, doomscrolling. And edgeless, endless, virtual cloud resources. And LLM indeterminism. Those are not inherintly bad, but it is different from what we’re used to. Is this still computing fit for the embodied mind?
Unrelated photo explanation: a cat I encountered in Athens on an evening stroll in the neighbourhood behind the hotel.