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 |  "what is code?" - quotes + one-line review

january 20th, 2016

I finally read "What Is Code?" by Paul Ford, his much-lauded novella-sized article for Bloomberg last summer. RIYL legit tech journalism and self-effacement.

Potent quotables
▹ Poor, sad, misbegotten, incredibly effective, massively successful PHP. Reading PHP code is like reading poetry, the poetry you wrote freshman year of college.

▹ Too much of what you know today will be useless in six months. Every hard-fought factoid about the absolute best and most principled way to use the language will be fetid zoo garbage by the end of the year. And some sniveling, bearded man-toddler will be looking slightly to yourright with his pale, buzzword-infected eyes and awkwardly mumbling, "Yeah, no, wow, it says you have a lot of Gulp and Angular, but I'm guessing you don't use Fleejob or Grimmex with the Snurt extensions? (Long sigh.) I'm just not sure if you're gonna like working here."

▹ Bookstores exist now in opposition to Amazon, and Amazon's interpretation of an electronic book is the reference point for the world. For its part, Amazon is not really a bookseller as much as a set of optimization problems around digital and physical distribution.

▹ Programmers argue over whether HTML is "programming" or not because they are paranoid about status and don’t want to allow mere tag-wranglers to claim blessed programmer status.

▹ It takes a certain temperament to page through standards documents, manuals, and documentation and read things like "data fields are transmitted least significant bit first" in the interest of understanding why, when you expected "ü," you keep getting "�."

▹ It's a comedy of ego, made possible by logic gates. I am not smart enough to be rich, but I'm always entertained.

▹ "Everything is edge cases," he says. "Testing and edge cases."

Things to check out later:

• http://eloquentjavascript.net/
  "A book about JavaScript, programming, and the wonders of the digital" by Marijn Haverbeke.


• https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/
  The E.W. Dijkstra Archive. Dijkstra was an influential member of computer science's founding generation. He wrote, often by hand, over a thousand memos - challenges, problems, and musings - to the world's CS community between the 1960s and the early 2000s. Known as "EWDs," the University of Texas has made them available in this digital archive.


• https://python-pillow.github.io/ (fork of the Python Imaging Library [PIL])
  I don't know much about Python aside from that I'd like to learn some. This Python-based mass image editor described in the article sounds like it's got some real potential.


• Two OG lady programmers:
  Ada Lovelace & Grace Murray Hopper

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