11/3/2023 0 Comments Ourworld facebook codeThe people who succeed at coding are the ones who can handle that epic, nonstop, daily frustration. Even the tiniest error-a misplaced bracket-can break things, and the computer often doesn't give you any easy clues as to what's wrong. Coding is incredibly, grindingly frustrating. There are the obvious ones, the traits that you might expect-people who are good at coding are usually good at thinking logically and systematically and breaking big problems down into small, solvable steps.īut there are other things that might surprise you. What personality traits are most common among programmers? What makes a good programmer? Drawing on his decades of reporting for Smithsonian, WIRED and The New York Times Magazine, he introduces us to the minds behind the lines of code, the people who are shaping and redefining our everyday world.Ĭoders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the Worldįrom acclaimed tech writer Clive Thompson comes a brilliant anthropological reckoning with the most powerful tribe in the world today, computer programmers, in a book that interrogates who they are, how they think, what qualifies as greatness in their world, and what should give us pause. Thompson weaves together interviews with all types of programmers, from ones at Facebook and Instagram whose code impacts hundreds of millions of people each day, to the coders obsessed with protecting data from those very same Big Tech companies. He traces the industry’s evolution to its current, very white and very male state and uncovers what challenges that homogeneity presents. In his new book Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World, he lays out the history of programming, highlighting the pioneering role women played. So Thompson has hacked the mindframe of these all-(too?)-powerful, very human beings. “If we want to understand how today’s world works, we ought to understand something about coders.” If they make it easier to do something, we do tons more of it,” he explained. “They set down the rules to determine how we're going to do things. In 1789, those people were the lawyers or legalists in 2019, it’s the coders. ![]() Society needed their skills badly, and just a few people could make decisions that had an enormous impact.” What the people in that class could do was suddenly incredibly important and incredibly political and pivotal. Throughout history, Thompson said, “a professional class has had an enormous amount of power. “They pushed their software update, and completely changed the country.’” “Hamilton, Madison and Jefferson entered “‘The Room Where it Happens’ and Hamilton out having written 20 lines of code that basically said, ‘Washington is going to be this center of power, and there’s going to be the national bank,’” Thompson told me. ![]() His take-away? The founding fathers were basically modern-day programmers. ![]() A few years ago, as journalist Clive Thompson started working on his new book about the world of coding and coders, he went to see the musical Hamilton.
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