The ‘FizzBuzz’ Programming Test: A Case-Based Exploration of Rhetorical Style in Code

Every code text is informed by stylistic decisions that impact how the text is interpreted and understood. While software developers have long discussed concerns of style in regards to writing code, scholars of computation would benefit from a rhetorical approach to style, an approach that links style to substance and sees style as situated and audience-specific. In this essay, several stylistic variations of code written for the ‘FizzBuzz’ hiring test are examined in order to demonstrate the significance of stylistic choice in code composition. The range of approaches coders might take to communicate a preferred method of accomplishing a given task in code indicates that rhetorical style performs an important role in how code is accessed and comprehended by human and nonhuman audiences alike. Accordingly, software critics need to attend more closely to the ways that coders employ rhetorical style in order to induce particular types of rhetorical action through their code texts and practices