What is code | Hacker News Reader

What is code

bloomberg.com

198 pointshenridf36 comments

This is one of my favourite articles. It's the first one I link to someone interested in coding or becoming a developer.

Even as a competent programmer, it's worth having a flick through as Paul Ford's presentation of code as a whole is so engaging and informative.

The 'scrum master' guy in the first chapter is the sort of terrible communicator who gives technical people a bad name. He either can't or won't express himself in terms familiar to his audience, instead throwing out a stream of terms that he knows mean nothing in a bid to appear sophisticated.

I actually hated that guy. Who would decide to rewrite an entire CMS in node.js?!

Originally, "code" referred to machine language. "Programming" meant designing the computation, and "coding" referred to translating it to machine language. "Automatic coding" was the term for translating a high level program to machine code, and it covered compiling and interpretation.

You can read all about it in Grace Hopper's 1955 paper Automatic Coding for Digital Computers.

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/univac/HopperAutoCodingPaper_19...

Though a woman, she talks the masculinized talk:

"The analysis is the responsibility of the mathematician or engineer, the methods or systems man."

[...]

"The job of the programmer is that of adapting the problem definition to the abilities and idiosyncracies of the particular computer. He will be vitally concerned with input and output and with the flow of operations through the computer. He must have a thorough knowledge of the computer components and their relative speeds and virtues."

[...]

"It is then the job of the coder to reduce the flow charts to the de- tailed list of computer instructions. At this point, an exact and comprehensive knowledge of the computer, its code, coding tricks, details of sentinels and of pulse code are required."

This is a beautiful distinction (one that I'm aware of), but which appears to have been lost today. Consequently, these terms are now used interchangeably, leading many people to conflate these two processes. However, this distinction is indicative of how getting a computer to do something has two components: 1. Figuring out what needs doing, and 2. Expressing this in a form that the computer can carry out.

Thank you for the Grace Hopper quotes!

The distinction is lost because in many cases it doesn't hold relevance anymore. You don't need to write flow-charts, state or class diagrams before you start writing code. Todays tooling allows for more iterative approaches and also leaves room for making syntax errors without having to wait hours and days to get "compiler" errors.

But I agree it's still interesting to know of the distinction and know that both can require slightly different skillsets. So when you have someone that is very good at planing and has the experience to layout complex systems in advance, you can assign them an architect title, while someone who knows a programming language inside and outside, you might be better off keeping them in the "driving" seat.

The point here is that when higher level languages were introduced, writing the higher level program was understood to be part of "programming"; and its compilation or interpretation became "automatic coding".

Another thing worth paying attention to in Grace Hopper's paper is this: higher level program code is in fact called "code", but specifically "pseudo code".

That which we call "pseudo code" today doesn't execute. But we sometimes remark that certain high level languages are almost like "executable pseudocode".

At that time, the task of the compiler/interpreter writer was to take "pseudo code", formalize it more precisely so that then the machine could "automatically code" from "pseudo code" to "code".'

> Though a woman, she talks the masculinized talk

I don't think that's accurate. It used to be that "he" and "man" were understood to be gender neutral in abstract and impersonal cases. Such as "to boldly go where no man has gone before" and "mankind" and "mailman". During Hopper's life, English language changed to expunge the ambiguity.

I have to concede that I still talk in this now outmoded manner. I have to make a conscious effort to switch to modern gender neutral language (eg. they) when speaking or writing to anyone outside my family and friends.

> English language changed to expunge the ambiguity.

I think it's more accurate to say it adopted different ambiguities. The use of 'they' can create ambiguities of number, and just switching between he/she leaves the same ambiguity (is the gendering intentional or not?) albeit in a gender balanced way.

As a side-note, 'he' was used to refer to people, who could be regarded as interchangeable (man or woman) and 'she' was reserved for 'uniquely individual' things, which is why countries and ships (as two examples) are referred to as such. At least, this was may understanding when growing up and I've never lost this habit.

Not only understood, but widely accepted as the grammatically correct general reference gender. English isn’t the only language to do this.

Interestingly, the German translation "one" (as in the gender neutral pronoun: "One must not both eat and talk.") is "man".

At the birth of Computer Science there is this notion that it's (as we might say today) turtles all the way down. Kurt Gödel, Alonzo Church, Alan Turing in the first half of the twentieth century come up with this weird stuff at the edge of the philosophy of mathematics to answer maddening questions, what is "computing" and what makes something "computable"? It seems to have no answer that isn't self-referential. The systems they imagine are endlessly defined in terms of themselves. But they are all theoreticians, and in theory this is perfectly satisfactory.

When actual digital computers get built, the engineers responsible for using them are not at first much interested in the theory of Computer Science, their machines resolutely do not come with an infinitely long paper tape, the problems they're solving are very specific and finite, these are practical people.

But Grace _applies_ the theory. Since the process of turning the high level (e.g. assembly language) into low level (e.g. holes in a paper tape) is mechanical, why not have the machine do it? And if this can be done, why not recurse, and produce even the assembly language from some higher level program. Productivity is improved enormously. And this is at the heart of everything today. Even our microprocessors are really full of microcode that implements more complicated instructions in terms of smaller ones, so that the "machine code" isn't the final form executed by the hardware in practice either.

> Though a woman, she talks the masculinized talk

You may or may not say "systems man" about a woman (depending on the language etc.), but I don't see that the sex of the _speaker_ has anything to do with it.

I don't think this really achieves what it sets out to do, unless it was meant to be aimed at already very tech-literate people who just don't program yet. It fails my usual test for laypersons' explanations: would my mum understand it?

My mum is a smart but non-techie person. I think this article, jumping off from its irrelevant take on business needs, through a (in my opinion) backwards diversion that fails to actually explain how computers process and display text, only then to touch on algorithms before racing off talking about conferences and how programmers feel about things, doesn't come close in all that to a solid laypersons' explanation. Soon it's asking you to evalute chunks of code when, if you are reading this article as someone who wants to know "what is code?", you don't even know what a loop is yet.

This seems more like "What is tech culture?" for people who are already a part of tech culture. I think people like it for its animations and interactive elements, but when you strip those away there's very little actual content there.

Considering this is Bloomberg the intended audience is likely business people. The "irrelevant take on business needs" is far from irrelevant in this context. On the contrary, it's describing the type of person this article is aimed at.

Good point. I've only seen it shared in very techie circles.

It succeeds in the goal of helping programmers understand how they are perceived by business people, and how to be effective in a business environment.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9698870

Also article about its reception: https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/7740986

I think code is data. In this case data to describe how to manage other data.

If you can represent your program with data, you likely should.

Amusing and whimsical. So.much.content. I enjoyed the end though. I spent about 17 minutes scrolling through, reading different parts and got to the end. It called me out for reading nearly 2k works per minute to finish in that time. haha.

Needs (2015)

Repost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9698870

So you listened to the Tomorrow podcast rerun as well?

I think I skimmed this when it first came out, but after two years working at a consulting firm where our clients are borderline tech illiterate, this seems like a pretty decent primer to me. It's not that our clients are idiots (mostly), it's just that they are lacking 20 years or context. This does a great job at filling in some of the gaps.

A favorite article of mine! Paul Ford has continued to write good explainers for Bloomberg Businessweek (most recently on the Github acquisition: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-06/github-is...) but I've been waiting for him to write something long form again...

>Some things that aren’t yet computers—dental floss, flashlights—will fall eventually.

My flashlight (bought before 2015) includes a microcontroller. I think most flashlights do now.

I wish they would tell the story further, including how the man in taupe blazer would deliver the project and whether it would be a success or not, and what would happen past delivery.

Very nice explanation. Now I'm hoping they will do an article on quantum entanglement in similar vein :)

To answer the question (without having read the article): Code is communication.

Code is used to communicate your intent to

- a machine

- others working on the same problem or application

- your future self

Obligatory source code: https://github.com/BloombergMedia/whatiscode

(I have a merged PR in there... do you? :))

Baby don't hurt me...

This song popped straight into my head too!

Before the humourless downvote-brigade gets you, here is the song for those unfamiliar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5G1FmU-ldg

don’t hurt me .. XOR

...no more

Came searching for this comment.

baby don't ret me

No Moore

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