The computer revolution can be envisioned as a “rewriting of the world.” Increasingly, in academia, industry, and government contexts, ideas are exchanged as computational models and software, rather than as printed prose documents. Software now constitutes a new form of logic and rhetoric, a new means of expression, articulation, and argumentation. I refer to this new era of thought and language as “digital ideology.”  The Software Arts is a study of information technology as a technology of language and a refiguration of computer science as a language art.  The book is an examination of computerization as a work of rewriting or, more specifically, as translation.  The claim is that the software arts is a new name for something that has been ongoing for centuries: the pursuit of methods that provide us the means to invent and interrogate statements that can be or already are widely accepted as statements of connection, equivalence, or identity.