I think there is a lot of romanticism in computing because there is a lot of irrationality. We don't like to admit that. We pretend to be "scientists". Irrationality is as much the engine of progress as reason. Both can be directed toward good or evil ends.

Ada Lovelace saw one romantic side of computing as the possibility of machines writing poetry, music and song. Today as much fear, horror and loathing as joy surrounds that idea - but that is also romantic in Mary Shelley's sense. Big-R Romantic features are in both; possibility, drama, tragedy, and rejection of reason according to a counter-enlightenment embrace of emotivism.

Ours is the age of impossibility - the hopeless inevitability of the status-quo, the lack of vision for alternative systems, amidst a grinding project to render all human affairs predictable, legible, identifiable, and controlled. Today "computer love" (the romance in computing) derives from the struggle to overcome the ignorant, cowering bureaucracy to which lesser men put machines in pursuit of mediocrity and dull power.