What Is 'What Is Code?'
motherboard.vice.com
motherboard.vice.com
Price of success I suppose, but now we have proclamations like "The world belongs to people who code. Those who don't understand will be left behind". Another example in a daily stream of hyperbolic mass media reports, reminding us yet again that 'software is eating the world'.
I have to say I preferred when the whole thing was regarded more as an exciting hobby - mostly by and for those who took the time to study the craft - than a world dominating force. This article may have value, but in those days you knew you were free of the grand statements. Money backs this new world, not code.
What a bizarre claim to make. Building houses is a necessary occupation in all societies. Are those of us who are ignorant or simply unwilling to learn the myriad skills needed herein 'being left behind'?
There will be more and more jobs that require the basic skills of coding and less and less jobs that require the basic skills of house building. That is what is meant by "left behind". Obviously the best house builders will always have jobs, but the mediocre ones who once were good enough to get basic jobs on most building sites will be in less and less demand.
A lot of people here seem to be criticizing it because it has something they don't think fits everyone: austenallred thinks most people won't like its brief explanation of classes, others seem to delight in picking out things they think most people wouldn't understand and writing snarky comments about them. But "fitting everyone" would be impossible due to the gigantic range of people reading the article. This article brought together everyone: old and young, the suits and the programmers, PHP script-kiddies and artisanal Haskell sculptors into one mass of enchanted readers.
The people I know that read this have almost nothing in common: wannabe teenage intellectuals, middle managers, a kind, witty man in his 70s, spouses of programmers, people learning to code. As another commenter said, this article is something new: an article as an event. [0] An article as art. [1] But instead of dividing people, as may be expected (news events all too often separate crowds into opposing mobs; modern art separates people faster than oil and water) it brought them all together to talk about code.
I'd like to see the proof in the pudding...in the original piece, Ford described how it was commissioned by the Bloomberg Businessweek editor who asked Ford, “Can you tell me what code is?”
It'd be interesting to hear from the editor -- after spending weeks (months?) editing all 38,000 words of Ford's piece -- can he/she now tell _everyone else_ what code is? I liked the piece (though I didn't finish all of it and skimmed a few parts)...but a lot of it struck me as reading that was very interesting/amusing because I was already a coder...I'm interested in what non-coders learned from it.
Before reading this article I reflexively sent it to my wife, thinking that WIC will clarify what it is I do for a living. WIC does that remarkably in explaining what it is like to be a programmer. It tackles the business side of things, the current trends, and some history. But it is much less successful, when it comes to explaining the code.
An example of where it fails in explaining code to the layperson is the part about compiling C code in the command line. Yes, a layperson could follow this step by step, but I think if they did they wouldn't be able to put it in a larger context. Ok, it is compiled but what does that mean? How does that compare to other languages? These are questions that are left unanswered for laypeople, so it is just confusing and unrewarding.
For me as a professional dev, I enjoyed that part, especially because I could relate to it: it is like finding a basic tutorial on line, starting from scratch and following it line by line, something I do all the time. WIC is an excellent insider piece that really captures the zeitgeist of programming. The question should be reframed. If you really want to know "What is code?" you should read Petzold's Code. Any layperson could read it. You would have to work but it rewards. What is Code is better at answering "What does it mean to be a coder right now?
I'm not sure this is a drawback to the article. Compiled vs. interpreted and etc. etc. is a huge set of things to explain and would muddle the point. Most laypeople probably aren't interested in the hypertechnical details--do you read an article on what it's like to do mathematics and come out wondering why they didn't go into more depth explaining why functions over complex manifolds have interesting properties? Is it not enough to say "Ok, continuous functions over complex manifolds are interesting compared to the functions you learned in high school (like y=x^2+x+1) because they are restricted to certain behaviors, which makes them easy to predict"?
In the end, the human story of "What does Jim at the end of the hall do all day, anyways?" or "What do the people who make my phones/car/computer/life work do, anyways?" or etc. is a lot more compelling and interesting than teaching the minutiae of 'code' as an abstract idea in an article, so I doubt a nontechnical layperson leaves unsatisfied with the explanations in the article. I don't look for technical explanations in articles on chemistry or biology, either, since I know I don't have the background to learn about them in what is well under a short book's worth of material--I'm not sure why anyone else would, either.
> So what if, whaaaat if, we made a little box called Customer (call it a “class,” as in the taxonomical sense, like a Customer is a subclass of the species human, which is a subclass of mammal, etc.), and we put the data and methods relating to customers into that box. (And by box, it’s literally just “public class Customer {}” and anything inside the {} relates to that particular class.)
It's a solid effort, but for someone who isn't technical, jumping from,"ok we have a thing called a class" to "and that's object oriented programming!" is just not something you can do in one paragraph, no matter how well it's written.
But then, how much better a job could anyone do to explain it to a non-coder? Past a certain point, you either dive in, or you don't.
And I think it's worth making a distinction between two aims - understanding a little about code and the culture around it, and learning how to write professional code.
Obviously you're not going to do the latter in 38,000 words.
But it's superb at the former.
Paul Ford and his editor Josh Tyrangiel went on Charlie Rose's show last week to talk about the essay, and you can get some sense of Tyrangiel's acquisition of the topic:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-06-12/-what-is-cod...
You don't need to reduce a computer to a clock with benefits to explain code any more than you need to explain how a typewriter works to explain writing.
Good thing the author has you to let him know!
And, frankly, the article is well-written, but hardly superb.
This article did a good job of that as well as many other aspects of software development.
The first computer-like things (e.g. Jacquard looms) were programmed by physical objects — indeed one of the first gadgets I learned to program used punchcards you punched manually with a pencil.
The digression into keyboards exemplifies the "self indulgent brain dump" issue I am complaining about. It reminds me of "Mathematics made difficult" except that the book in question was humorous and not pretending to make its subject more accessible.
This article is great for a reasonably knowledgeable programmer to read and think "oh yes, this really nails what a complex and subtle and deep thing programming is, how astonishing it is that when I type a key so much magic happens to even make it appear on a screen, let alone be saved somewhere for posterity, and how amazingly clever I am for understanding all this stuff... mostly". What it completely fails to do is explain programming, or "code" to anyone else. And wasn't that the point?
One part of the podcast that stuck with me was the idea of an article as an event. It really was quite a while ago people talked about a text as an event. I mean, like a new book or something.
I guess Buzzfeed (and the like, which is everyone nowadays) is sort of trying to pay for their real journalism with "aww"-clicks and "omg!"-clicks, it wouldn't surprise me if cool articles like this became more of a commonplace thing.
But they don't appear every day. Or maybe they do, but not always as successfully?
I agree that another success means that we'll probably see more attempts.
Edit: Found it. https://github.com/BloombergMedia/whatiscode
Damn, the network graph looks like the devil's hot kitchen.
> the original was org-mode but it had to become word
I'm surprised -- almost annoyed, honestly -- to see that the story body is just one giant honking HTML file:
https://github.com/BloombergMedia/whatiscode/blob/master/ind...
Maybe it started life as separate files that were assembled, and is now only being edited ad hoc after the first public commit [1]? Maybe...but there's no reason why the repo couldn't contain the component pieces (by that, I mean the individual sections of the page), and rebuild them via grunt. In fact, that would make it far easier to do ad-hoc fixes...as fixing HTML by hand is always a pain in the ass...nevermind working within a 3,000+ line file.
I guess I'm just "annoyed" because mitigating the problems of working with large, raw HTML -- and other parts of the textfile-to-publishing process -- is one of those things that is so wonderfully the domain of the programmer. For non-programming journalists, there's just no concept of being able to create a one-command deterministic "build" of a story...so separating the story into multiple files is very impractical...because it means you have to reassemble them by copying-pasting when it's publication time. Also, since the average writer tends to work in Word or some other proprietary document format (I've spent a lot of my web production career translating .docx files to HTML to be pasted into a Wordpress body field)...jumping into different files is not as easy as it is when you're working with Markdown and Sublime Text. Also, much harder to do a article-wide search-and-replace across multiple .docx files.
After learning Markdown (specifically, Kramdown) and static content systems like Jekyll and Middleman...I honestly could not be paid to go into a job where I had to build/publish content a non-automated process...e.g. a rich text editor, whether Word or WordPress. Being able to produce good writing means, well, first being a good writer, of course...but it's far easier to focus on being a good writer when the production process is made frictionless.
[1] https://github.com/BloombergMedia/whatiscode/commit/837bc712...
you have a really low bar for what constitutes a pain in the ass.
> You expect your staff to speak in plain language.
> This policy has served you well in many facets of
> operations, but it hasn’t worked at all when it
> comes to overseeing software development.
And this statement makes me mad:
> All of the computer code that keeps the website
> running must be replaced. At one time, it was
> very valuable and was keeping the company
> running, but the new CTO thinks it’s garbage.
P.S. Filler doesnt mean its fluff. it was very interesting.
I recently decided to start the "From NAND to Tetris" Coursera course which led me to starting Petzold's "Code" and then this article comes along.
There are people like my wife who have zero knowledge of coding, and likely won't ever care enough about it to make it through this article (I tried, she didn't get very far). They just have no interest, and I can respect that.
However for people like myself, I've realized that the more layers of the onion I peel back, the more intrigued I become. When I think about it, I was fascinated by fantasy-based magic systems when I was younger. I'm talking things like D&D, Mage: The Ascension, etc. Then I read "The Wiz Biz" by Rick Cook and realized that I was sucked in at the end when he realized how he could harness the basic "first principles" of this fantasy magic system to build abstractions that allowed for modern day coding principles.
My mind was blown, but I didn't realize just how much at the time.
Harry Potter interested me from the standpoint of "wow, I'd love to learn magic in an academic environment--how cool would that be?" And then I found myself hooked on the Magicians Trilogy by Lev Grossman which got as deep as I'd ever seen a book get on some of the mechanics of the actual magic system.
Finally, I put two and two together and realized that what appealed to me about all of this was the gradual understanding/building of a complex system based on its simple component parts, and the deep knowledge that was needed to master it. Then I realized that this was why I'm currently geeking out on going under the hood of modern day abstractions and working up from First Principles.
Again, I'm an "early" programmer. I don't fully grok half the crap I read. But I've realized that learning software development on my own is about as close as I'll ever get to working real, modern day magic. Clarke's 3rd law "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." is very much top of mind lately. The fact that I can twiddle my fingers on a couple buttons and conjure up pictures, video, any information I want, etc. is pure magic.
There are many people out there like me who are amazed by the raw scope of how far we've come, and this article did an amazing job at reminding me of that, even though I may not have been the target audience, and that is why I enjoyed it immensely.
Some people are scared and overwhelmed by complexity, while others seek to understand it and tear it apart. I firmly believe the latter would have much more interest in this article than the former.
New to hacker news. Loving the discussion that goes on here.
First off, I love that the article we're discussing compares WIC to Snowfall. An apt comparison to be sure.
http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/#/?part=tunne...
So now, about What Is Code, not about the commentary on it:
I got into this article today not knowing it was ~40k words. I was tired by the time I got to the silly certificate at the bottom, but I stayed intrigued the whole way. It was well paced and had a fascinating amount of depth.
I admire the authors' ability to write unapologetically from his own perspective. The sheer scope of this piece was a delight to dive into.
So same here. Not the target audience and enjoyed it immensely.
I don't see one article, no matter how brilliant, providing the tools make any meaningful progress on that little management wet dream.
I learned how to write functions and subroutines a long time before learning algebra. The way that functions were taught in my math class were so confusing. Eventually I realized they were the same as what I learned coding.