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What is code
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Re: What is code
#22So 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.
Re: What is code
#23Baby don't hurt me...
Came searching for this comment.
Re: What is code
#24The '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?!
Re: What is code
#25Originally, "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/…
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…
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.
Re: What is code
#26Originally, "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/…
> 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.
Re: What is code
#27Very nice explanation. Now I'm hoping they will do an article on quantum entanglement in similar vein :)
Re: What is code
#28Baby don't hurt me...
baby don't ret me
Re: What is code
#29Originally, "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/…
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.