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Book excerpt: "I learned the language of computer programming in my 50s - here's what I discovered"
A fairly entertaining read (about a ten minute read)
Excerpt from: Devil in the Stack: A Coding Odyssey by Andrew Smith is published by Grove Press (£16.99)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/aug/31/learning-computer-programming-language-coding-devil-stack-andrew-smith
First four paragraphs...
One day in 2017 I had a realisation that seems obvious now but had the power to shock back then: almost everything I did was being mediated by computer code. And as the trickle of code into my world became a flood, that world seemed to be getting not better but worse in approximate proportion. I began to wonder why.
Two possibilities sprang immediately to mind. One was the people who wrote the code – coders – long depicted in pop culture as a clan of vaguely comic, Tolkien-worshipping misfits. Another was the uber-capitalist system within which many worked, exemplified by the profoundly weird Silicon Valley. Were one or both using code to recast the human environment as something more amenable to them?
There was also a third possibility, one I barely dared contemplate because the prospect of it was so appalling. What if there was something about the way we compute that was at odds with the way humans are? I’d never heard anyone suggest such a possibility, but in theory, at least, it was there. Slowly, it became clear that the only way to find out would be to climb inside the machine by learning to code myself.
As a writer in my 50s with no technical background, I knew almost nothing about how code worked. But I had come across – and been intrigued by – coders when writing a magazine feature about bitcoin a few years before. The cryptocurrency’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, had left few clues as to his identity before vanishing. Yet he had left 100,000 lines of code, which I found his peers reading like literature. I learned that there were thousands of programming languages used to communicate with the machines, including a few dozen big ones whose names tended to suggest either roses or unconscionably strong cleaning products (Perl, Ruby, Cobol, Go), and that each had its own distinct ethos and cultish band of followers, parlayed into subcultures as passionate and complete as the youth subcultures – punks, mods, goths, skinheads – I grew up with.
Two possibilities sprang immediately to mind. One was the people who wrote the code – coders – long depicted in pop culture as a clan of vaguely comic, Tolkien-worshipping misfits. Another was the uber-capitalist system within which many worked, exemplified by the profoundly weird Silicon Valley. Were one or both using code to recast the human environment as something more amenable to them?
There was also a third possibility, one I barely dared contemplate because the prospect of it was so appalling. What if there was something about the way we compute that was at odds with the way humans are? I’d never heard anyone suggest such a possibility, but in theory, at least, it was there. Slowly, it became clear that the only way to find out would be to climb inside the machine by learning to code myself.
As a writer in my 50s with no technical background, I knew almost nothing about how code worked. But I had come across – and been intrigued by – coders when writing a magazine feature about bitcoin a few years before. The cryptocurrency’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, had left few clues as to his identity before vanishing. Yet he had left 100,000 lines of code, which I found his peers reading like literature. I learned that there were thousands of programming languages used to communicate with the machines, including a few dozen big ones whose names tended to suggest either roses or unconscionably strong cleaning products (Perl, Ruby, Cobol, Go), and that each had its own distinct ethos and cultish band of followers, parlayed into subcultures as passionate and complete as the youth subcultures – punks, mods, goths, skinheads – I grew up with.
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