Journalism: Paul Ford: What is Code

 https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-paul-ford-what-is-code/

This was something I had started to read when it was first published, but couldn't find the time to sit and read 38,000 words on my phone.

The author makes a good show of coding and how it works.  I'm a bit less convinced than he is that coding is running everything.  These breaths are still human.

Anyway, the best example is about how 60 frames a second for movies works.  It is a bunch of still pictures but we think it is moving.  Lots of computation, done with or through code, works in a similar way.  Lots of computation makes things look fluid.

Anyway, here are some good quotes:

Look at the new reality we’ve defined, the way that difficult things are now easy and drab things can be colorful.

I hope they define my reality with plenty of colors

 “Ecosystem” is another debased word, especially given what we keep doing to the real, physical one around us. But if a few hundred thousand people are raising their kids and making things for 100 million people, that’s what they call it.

 Things are based on elitism.

Bugs aren’t the original sin of programming. They’re just part of life, like unwanted body hair or political campaigns. 

 I am a human bug. I am also hairy.  Think of that what you may.

What the coders aren’t seeing, you have come to believe, is that the staid enterprise world that they fear isn’t the consequence of dead-eyed apathy but rather détente.

I hope coders have seen the power.