What Is Code?

I hate to sound hyperbolic, but I can&#x27;t overstate how impressive this work is. For me, it evokes nothing so much as Tracy Kidder&#x27;s The Soul of A New Machine [0] for opening up an obscure world (the one many HN posters live in, but obscure to most people). I am amazed both by the technical fidelity and by the quality of the story telling.<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0316491977&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder&#x2F;dp&#x2F;03164...</a>

&gt; Writing this article was a nightmare because I know that no matter how many people review it, I’ll have missed something, some thread that a reader can pull and say, “He missed the essence of the subject.” I know you’re out there, ashamed to have me as an advocate. I accept that. I know that what I describe as “compilation” is but a tiny strand of that subject; I know that the ways I characterize programming languages are reductive. This was supposed to be a brief article, and it became a brief book. So my apologies for anything that absolutely should have been here, but isn’t. They gave me only one magazine.

This is too freaking awesome!<p>Isn&#x27;t that a seriously mind-bendy kind of article to appear on Bloomberg? Also, isn&#x27;t it very cool that a whole class of people who may not know a thing about coding (but may be interested) might get to know something about the craft and culture?<p>And it&#x27;s presented in a very fun, off-kilter sort of way. That must have been a hell of a lot of work. I actually skimmed the second half and the little robot told me I read it all in 16 minutes which was not possible and who was I kidding!<p>I had a thought the other day while browsing Etsy. If software really is a craft, could I fashion a bespoke software creation and sell it on Etsy? I know this might seem like a non sequitur. But, you know, what is code? Why couldn&#x27;t I do something like that?<p>It&#x27;s such a strange but vital profession. (Seriously, I would have thought there are a _lot_ more than 11,000,000 professional coders worldwide) and one that is still coming to terms with itself. Inspiring. Note to self, do not think outside the box, code your way out of the box.

The activity on the article&#x27;s accompanying github (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;BloombergMedia&#x2F;whatiscode" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;BloombergMedia&#x2F;whatiscode</a>) is really interesting. Users have suggested edits not only to the code in the article but even to add citation.<p>This adds another dimension to the content by including the open source community such that the subject matter (coders) can influence (and improve!) their article&#x27;s content.

This is supposed to be an introduction just to the <i>abstract concept</i> of code, yet it includes a section that asks the reader to take a test on whether or not they agree with the author on the effectiveness of domain-specific snippets of JavaScript (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;graphics&#x2F;2015-paul-ford-what-is-code&#x2F;#tinder" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;graphics&#x2F;2015-paul-ford-what-is-cod...</a>) - one that replies to your selections with obtuse references to the code&#x27;s use of promises and callbacks.<p>As an outsider, I just love it when I read something presented as an introductory text and I&#x27;m confronted with an elaborate series of self-serving in-jokes that go &quot;ha ha ha, ha ha ha, you don&#x27;t know what I&#x27;m talking about!&quot;

My Dad always tells me he flat out does not understand what I do. He respects it, knows it&#x27;s challenging and fun, but just doesn&#x27;t get it.<p>I&#x27;ve sent this to him -- he&#x27;s about 1&#x2F;4 of the way through and thoroughly enjoying it.<p>This is a very fun read that&#x27;s worth leafing through

&gt; There have been countless attempts to make software easier to write...Decades of efforts have gone into helping civilians write code...Nothing yet has done away with developers, developers, developers, developers.<p>I still believe. Someday, somewhere, something incredible will emerge for the right-brained bourgeoisie and literati.

I&#x27;ve always wanted to attempt this piece: to take all the many layers of abstraction that we deal with, parse them, convert them, and render them through my formidable linguistic talents into one elegant, beautifully constructed piece of prose that magically makes it all comprehensible to lay readers. I haven&#x27;t yet attempted it, but I give props to Mr. Ford for trying. I&#x27;m not surprised he ended up with a novella.<p>Oh, and why does bloomberg.com want to use my web cam?

What an ambitious and beautiful piece!<p>A story like this is probably dangerous - it touches on so many ideas everyone will find something to gripe with, and it&#x27;s hard to make a comprehensive and consistent story.<p>The last time I read something that so awesomely bridged high level abstractions and low-level implementations with a human touch was Godel, Escher, Bach (albeit with a very different feel). Well done.

It&#x27;s 2015. The audience of this article shouldn&#x27;t even exist. The reader, as described in the article, is a VP who has so little understanding about what it is his company does, that the only meaningful abstraction he can mentally picture is that of his employees &quot;burning barrels of money&quot;.<p>Imagine an auto company VP who says &quot;I don&#x27;t know anything about engines and drivetrains and all that technical stuff. All I know is that when you guys are in a meeting talking about your variable valve timing system, all I smell is money burning!&quot;<p>That would not be acceptable. Yet, here we are, over 30 years after the original IBM PC was released, and there&#x27;s still a corner-office audience for &quot;what is a computer?&quot;

Source for accompanying interactives - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;BloombergMedia&#x2F;whatiscode" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;BloombergMedia&#x2F;whatiscode</a>

I think of Minecraft as a visual representation of a database. Every block you see has a set of values, starting with the 3 that determine its location within the world (coordinates) and extending to include block type, which determines other values.<p>And too, even the open spaces. For Minecraft reminds you that a block can occupy any space. Indeed, an open space is a set of blocks whose block type is &quot;open&quot;, which makes it both transparent to light sent from neighboring blocks, as well as not blocking player movement.

I love how the page calls you out for skimming it instead of reading it.

Computer don&#x27;t hurt me, don&#x27;t hurt me, no more

It&#x27;s easy: the code is that part of the computer which can&#x27;t be grabbed and slammed but only cursed.

I did not expect this good of an article on this subject from a business publication. Well done.

I kind of like my answer better: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;qr.ae&#x2F;7NEnT9" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;qr.ae&#x2F;7NEnT9</a><p>The whole post is just a stream of consciousness brain dump that a layman would never understand. I believe it&#x27;s possible to explain these things without circular reasoning.

In my opinion, this is what society today needs. I don&#x27;t feel like we need everyone to be able to code, but rather just have a sense on some level that computers are nothing mysterious or magical, unconquerable or incomprehensible, but rather just machines of human creation.

Holy CPU time! That site consumes 100% of my CPU (presumably 100% of one core) whenever it is in the front tab (Firefox&#x2F;OS X).<p>Anyone else experiencing that or is it just my laptop running wild?

You need to Konami code this bad-boy.

&quot;That’s how change enters into this world. Slowly at first, then on the front page of Hacker News.&quot;<p>How meta.

I had no idea they made an hour long educational video on windows 95 with the cast of Friends! That is awesomely 90&#x27;s. This is a really cool write up, clearly a lot of work went into it

Imagine a world where everyone has their own social version of a Github page instead of a Facebook wall.

This is the best write-up explaining software I have ever seen. Wow.

Smash the patriarchy! Check the console.

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;graphics&#x2F;2015-paul-ford-what-is-code&#x2F;#fn.25" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;graphics&#x2F;2015-paul-ford-what-is-cod...</a><p>&gt; You know what, though? Cobol has a great data-description language. If you spend a lot of time formatting dates and currency, and so forth, it’s got you. (If you’re curious, search for “Cobol Picture clause.”)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=%E2%80%9CCobol+Picture+clause.%E2%80%9D&amp;oq=%E2%80%9CCobol+Picture+clause.%E2%80%9D&amp;aqs=chrome..69i57&amp;sourceid=chrome&amp;es_sm=0&amp;ie=UTF-8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=%E2%80%9CCobol+Picture+claus...</a><p>What am I supposed to be looking at here?

Superb writing. I wish all professional writers could write this well.

tldr; watch the video: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;videos&#x2F;2015-06-10&#x2F;invisible-computer-code-runs-your-life" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;videos&#x2F;2015-06-10&#x2F;invisible-co...</a>

What a strange, long, rambling novella on programming languages.

I like the idea, but is there really no way to mute the audio? Sadly I did not finish the article because of that.

A couple parts of it remind me a lot of JBQ&#x27;s post on &quot;dizzying but invisible depth&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plus.google.com&#x2F;+JeanBaptisteQueru&#x2F;posts&#x2F;dfydM2Cnepe" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plus.google.com&#x2F;+JeanBaptisteQueru&#x2F;posts&#x2F;dfydM2Cnepe</a>

Part of me looks at this and thinks, &quot;This is preaching to the choir&quot;...because while the engineer in me appreciates all the layers and explorations...It must be incredibly bewildering to anyone who is not a coder, which is the ostensible audience given that the story starts off with, &#x27;We are here because the editor of this magazine asked me, “Can you tell me what code is?”&#x27;<p>But then I see the interactive circuit simulation and think &quot;Fuck it, who cares, this is awesome!&quot;. Designing circuits is one of those things that, if I were a self-learned coder instead of a comp. eng major, I would&#x27;ve never delved into...yet learning how to build an adder circuit and getting an appreciation of the most basic building block of computation (and how surprisingly complex it is to just add 1s and 0s) is a profound lesson that I think is essential for me, personally, to really grok programming. All the sections about culture and conferences and etc. are a little bit off-field for me...it&#x27;s not that I don&#x27;t think that code and life and human thought and behavior aren&#x27;t intertwined... * I just think the discussion about conferences reads as if the author doesn&#x27;t realize that all disciplines spawn conferences and conferences culture. There&#x27;s nothing particularly unique about code conferences. Not the sexism, not even the nerdiness.<p>I would love to see the OP&#x27;s editor respond in a not-quite-as-length essay. What did they learn about code after reading the piece that they didn&#x27;t understand before?<p>edit: * I&#x27;m emphatically <i>not</i> arguing &quot;Oh but everyone does conferences shittily so tech conferences shouldn&#x27;t be shamed&quot;. Just that having it in this &quot;What is Code&quot; essay makes it seem as if it&#x27;s a notable &quot;feature&quot; of programming...but that understates the problem by an order of magnitude. Sadly, it&#x27;s a feature in most every discipline, and the inherent feature is the gender imbalance, not the topic of the conference.<p>edit: Also, I wished that the section on Debugging was much higher than it is...Robert Read&#x27;s &quot;How to be a Programmer&quot; [1] makes it the first skill, and that&#x27;s about the right spot for it in the hierarchy of things. Maybe it gets overlooked because it has the connotation of something you do after you&#x27;ve fucked up. But, besides the fact that programming is almost inherently about fucking up, the skill of debugging really underscores the deterministic, logical nature of programming, the idea that if we have to, we can trace things down to the bit to know exactly what has been fucked up in even the most complex of programs. And that&#x27;s an incredibly powerful feature of programming...and not very well-emphasized to most non-coders.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;samizdat.mines.edu&#x2F;howto&#x2F;HowToBeAProgrammer.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;samizdat.mines.edu&#x2F;howto&#x2F;HowToBeAProgrammer.html</a>

baby don&#x27;t hurt me baby don&#x27;t hurt me no more

Was the bit about PHP standing for Personal Home Page a joke? I always thought it was &quot;PHP Hypertext Preprocessor&quot;. The coolest thing about PHP is the infinite recursion in its name!

The article ended up just yanking my Firefox session to somewhere in the middle of the page, followed by some Clippy expy nagging me about how fast I&#x27;m supposedly reading the article.

I think of it as a beautiful, colourful, crystalline structure.

Very interesting read... I enjoyed it.<p>One thing I noticed though is that the author is definitely stuck in the old &quot;Microsoft is the great Satan&quot; mindset. If he ever finds out about all the open-source stuff MS is doing these days under Satya Nadella, I think his head would probably explode.<p>He doesn&#x27;t know what to say to a C# developer (nothing in common), but automatically trusts a Python developer? Really? <i>sigh</i>

I like Paul Ford -- first thing that made me subscribe to his Medium feed was this piece about brief, remembering and old computers: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;message&#x2F;networks-without-networks-7644933a3100" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;message&#x2F;networks-without-networks-7644933...</a>

Anyone know what happens when you allow bloomberg.com to use your camera when you finish reading the article?

The scroll performance was bothering me so much i had to add transform: translateZ(0); to the #background-canvas element of the page to stop the screen painting on every f<i></i>king scroll; to continue to read in peace without my eyes bleeding. Great article though :)

I had to switch to view&#x2F;source to read the article. Halfway through there was a shopping cart on wheels obstructing the text (ironic).<p>* &lt;div class=&quot;videoWrapper&quot;&gt;<p><pre><code> &lt;div class=&quot;videoWrapper2&quot;&gt;</code></pre> &lt;script src=&#x27;&#x2F;&#x2F;cdn.gotraffic.net&#x2F;projector&#x2F;latest&#x2F;bplayer.js&#x27;&gt;BPlayer(null, {&quot;id&quot;:&quot;P4_i7PihRGiWcPh3gdNMhg&quot;,&quot;htmlChildId&quot;:&quot;bbg-video-player-P4_i7PihRGiWcPh3gdNMhg&quot;,&quot;serverUrl&quot;:&quot;<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;api&#x2F;embed&quot;,&quot;idType&quot;:&quot;BMMR&quot;,&quot;autoplay&quot;:false,&quot;video_autoplay_on_page&quot;:false,&quot;log_debug&quot;:false,&quot;ui_controls_popout&quot;:false,&quot;use_js_ads&quot;:true,&quot;ad_code_prefix&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;ad_tag_gpt_preroll&quot;:true,&quot;ad_tag_gpt_midroll&quot;:true,&quot;ad_tag_sz_preroll&quot;:&quot;1x7&quot;,&quot;ad_tag_sz_midroll&quot;:&quot;1x7&quot;,&quot;ad_tag_sz_overlay&quot;:&quot;1x7&quot;,&quot;ad_network_id_preroll&quot;:&quot;5262&quot;,&quot;ad_network_id_midroll&quot;:&quot;5262&quot;,&quot;ad_network_id_overlay&quot;:&quot;5262&quot;,&quot;ad_tag_cust_params_preroll&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;ads_vast_timeout&quot;:10000,&quot;ads_playback_timeout&quot;:10000,&quot;wmode&quot;:&quot;opaque&quot;,&quot;use_comscore&quot;:true,&quot;comscore_ns_site&quot;:&quot;bloomberg&quot;,&quot;comscore_page_level_tags&quot;:{&quot;bb_brand&quot;:&quot;bbiz&quot;,&quot;bss_cont_play&quot;:0,&quot;bb_region&quot;:&quot;US&quot;},&quot;use_chartbeat&quot;:true,&quot;chartbeat_uid&quot;:&quot;15087&quot;,&quot;chartbeat_domain&quot;:&quot;bloomberg.com&quot;,&quot;use_share_overlay&quot;:true,&quot;share_metadata&quot;:{&quot;canonical_url&quot;:&quot;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bloom.bg&#x2F;1GzwRDU&quot;},&quot;vertical&quot;:&quot;business&quot;,&quot;ad_tag_overlay&quot;:&quot;business&#x2F;videooverlay&quot;,&quot;zone&quot;:&quot;video&quot;,&quot;source&quot;:&quot;BBIZweb&quot;,&quot;module_conviva_insights&quot;:&quot;enabled&quot;,&quot;conviva_account&quot;:&quot;c3.Bloomberg&quot;,&quot;width&quot;:640,&quot;height&quot;:360,&quot;ad_tag&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;ad_tag_midroll&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;offsite_embed&quot;:false});&lt;&#x2F;script&gt;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;api&#x2F;embed&quot;,&quot;idType&quot;:&quot;BMMR&quot;,&quot;autopla...</a> &lt;&#x2F;div&gt;<p><pre><code> &lt;&#x2F;div&gt;</code></pre> *<p>Also - I have no CPU activity at all, so presumably some plugins that are running for others, aren&#x27;t being executed in my copy of chrome.

&gt; Smalltalk’s history is often described as slightly tragic, because many of its best ideas never permeated the culture of code. But it’s still around, still has users, and anyone can use Squeak or Pharo. Also—<p>&gt;<p>&gt; 1. Java is an object-oriented language, influenced by C++, that runs on a virtual machine (just like Smalltalk).<p>&gt; 2. Objective-C, per its name, jammed C and Smalltalk together with no apologies.<p>&gt; 3. C# (pronounced “C sharp”) is based on C and influenced by Java, but it was created by Microsoft for use in its .NET framework.<p>&gt; 4. C++ is an object-oriented version of C, although its roots are more in Simula.<p>&gt;<p>&gt; The number of digital things conceived in 1972 that are still under regular discussion is quite small. (It was the year of The Godfather and Al Green’s Let’s Stay Together.) The world corrupts the pure vision of great ideas. I pronounce Smalltalk a raging, wild, global success.<p>Except that these examples are &quot;object-oriented&quot; in almost <i>none</i> of the ways Smalltalk was object-oriented: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;reesoo.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;reesoo.html</a><p>The specious reasoning on display in this paragraph is almost <i>offensive</i> in its glib uncomprehension. Calling Smalltalk &quot;a raging, wild, global success&quot; because modern programming languages call themselves &quot;object-oriented&quot; is like saying women in technology are well-represented because Ada Lovelace was the first programmer.<p>I get that it&#x27;s supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, but like the rest of the writing in this article, it&#x27;s supposed to be tongue-in-cheek in a way that gestures toward what the author <i>actually thinks</i>. In this case, what it&#x27;s gesturing at is the notion that Smalltalk has had a large-scale tangible influence (if not wholesale adoption) on modern programming languages, which, if you actually take the time to understand the subject, is <i>just not true</i>.

The print edition has landed!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;ftrain&#x2F;status&#x2F;609388625596416001" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;ftrain&#x2F;status&#x2F;609388625596416001</a>

The Charlie Rose interview about this piece: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;charlierose.com&#x2F;watch&#x2F;60575137" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;charlierose.com&#x2F;watch&#x2F;60575137</a>

&gt; “No,” I said. “First of all, I’m not good at the math. I’m a programmer, yes, but I’m an East Coast programmer, not one of these serious platform people from the Bay Area.”<p>seriously?

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;whatiscode" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;whatiscode</a>

I would have <i>loved</i> the new Safari mute features on that page....<p>How dare you pollute my ears with garbage without a mute option.

Fun article. Even to this day sometimes I look at the software we have all built and wonder:<p>&gt; It’s amazing any of it works at all.

Resizing my browser window (Firefox 38) in the middle of reading causes a section of the story to loop infinitely.

Code is a demonstration, the ipothesis are the requisites. Actually, the test class is the proof!

very cool article<p>although to a layman I would try to answer &quot;what is code&quot; more simply: code is just instructions.<p>instructions for how to tie a windsor knot or cook a recipe or play a piano piece can be thought of as &quot;code&quot; executed by the human.

i viewed source to see how they did the custom skin and noticed this:<p><pre><code> if (!console.log) console.log = function(){} </code></pre> shouldnt it be if(window.console) ?

&gt; It’s a comedy of ego, made possible by logic gates.

Anyone else find the easter egg ?<p>(..old school video game code)

What a cpu and memory hog that page is!

Many disclaimers:<p>1. This clearly took A LOT of work, and I have not finished reading it. I intend to, but as another comment calculated below, that will take around 127 minutes. This comment is simply about the beginning.<p>2. I&#x27;m not 100% certain yet what the intended goal of this article is, so I may just be off base. That being said, my criticisms should be interpreted more as questions, since I&#x27;m deeply fascinated with how to make programming more accessible. I hope they are taken as such, and people share their experiences&#x2F;successes&#x2F;failures in getting people to understand &quot;what we do&quot;. Again, like other commenters here I have suffered the fate of parents not really understanding what you do (unlike the even superficial understanding of what a physicist does).<p>3. People learn differently, this is me pretending to not know anything and reading this article. It is thus flawed on two axises: I can&#x27;t know for sure how I would have taken it in, and even if I did, it may be great for most people but bad for me.<p>All that being said, I had a few issues with this article(&#x27;s beginning) if the goal is to make programming seem understandable to non-programmers. It seems to jump around a lot at the beginning and focus on just how complex everything is. If the goal is &quot;programmers are justified in their work, look how complex everything they deal with is!&quot;, then this may be an OK approach. However, if the goal is to help them understand what we do day to day, it may not.<p>Some examples:<p>1. The early references to math. I once upon a time thought math was a pre-requisite to programming. I have now met enough awesome programmers that are absolute rubbish at math that I no longer believe that to be true. I believe referring to the &quot;math&quot; of things a lot scares people off (makes it seem like &quot;one of those math things math people do&quot; and inaccessible, when in reality your everyday programmer does not do a lot of (complex) math).<p>2. The early reference to circuits, compilation, and keyboard codes. This is a tremendous amount of scope that is unnecessary in my opinion, and just makes everything seem so obtuse. Showing keyboard codes goes a long way in conveying how much a computer does, but I feel is very confusing in relation to programming. I don&#x27;t deal with &quot;keyboard codes&quot;. We could also get into for example the actual hardware and how even having to deal with denouncing a key is hard! But I think everyone would see why that isn&#x27;t great for the (introduction) of a programming explanation.<p>3. The circuits I believe are pretty and let you do things interactively, but I have a hard time believing they convey any information to people not familiar with programming. No one knows what XOR means (which you can flip the gates to), and just furthers the idea that code is this weird incantation we do. More putting them in &quot;awe&quot; of programming than understanding it.<p>Then again, I&#x27;ve been criticized for relying to heavily on analogy. My explanation would probably start with a lot of hand waiving: &quot;lets tell the computer to get a sandwhich shall we?&quot;, then trying to get deeper bit by bit, etc. Others have probably tried this and failed, so I am genuinely curious if people walk away from this article feeling like they have a better understanding of things.

&quot;If you’re old enough to remember DOS, you know what a command line is.&quot;<p>This is a joke right?

TLDR, good lord

I would try to explain it as levels of abstraction and how they extend beyond the computers that execute the code. You can go down through the levels of abstraction, 1 by 1, until the point is made rather than attempting to start from the bottom and work up.<p>So, for example, when talking to the non-technical executive, the first level of abstraction is the technical expert that tries to explain complex technical issues. Below that, there might be a technical management layer that deals with technical issues on a more granular level, but still isn&#x27;t looking at the code. Below that there&#x27;s the actual developers who are writing code and are concerned with the actual logic the computer is executing. Below that are the framework authors that abstract away the common parts of writing an application of a certain type. Below that are the language platform authors who write compilers or interpreters that translate the code typed by the programmers into a format that either the computer or a lower-level abstraction (LLMV, etc) deals with. At this point, it&#x27;s probably not necessary to go any lower, but you can go all the way down to CPU&#x2F;machine architecture level, if necessary.<p>The key point is that even highly-technical people have to trust the layers of abstraction below the point where they have full understanding. I&#x27;ve been coding for over 20 years and I still only have a cursory understanding of how my compiler is translating the code I write into machine code, let alone how the actual hardware that runs the code. I took EE courses in college and understand the theory, but the implementation by the folks at Intel and other hardware vendors is opaque to me and I&#x27;m forced to trust that it works.<p>The coders employed by your company may be able to dig into framework code, but the chances are that they&#x27;re fully trusting the runtimes that they work with. That trust may be the result of a well-earned reputation or through testing that the claims made by the language runtime are empirically true, but it&#x27;s still trusting something that they&#x27;re unequipped to verify themselves. This need to trust bubbles all the way up to senior management. The systems are just too complex for anyone concerned with the finished product to understand the whole picture.<p>That means that, as an executive, you&#x27;re likely trusting your senior technical leadership. The only way you avoid doing that is to dig in and better understand the abstraction layer they&#x27;re providing. You can also make that trust easier by doing the same sorts of things that a coder does with their language runtime...give tasks to your abstraction layer and test whether they&#x27;re completed successfully. And, when those tasks are not completed successfully, don&#x27;t accept techno-babble responses, dig in to understand the wheres and whys of where things broke down. Likely, the chain of trust of those abstraction layers was broken at some point...figure out where that point was so you can prevent it from happening again.<p>Every abstract layer adds uncertainty to the system. A CPU engineer can tell you how long a small task will take within a ns or so. A compiler engineer can tell you how many CPU cycles an expression will result in and compute an approximate time for a given processor within microseconds. And it continues as you go up the chain until you&#x27;re talking to senior management and he&#x27;s giving you swags with a margin of error of months. Understanding this goes a long way towards explaining the behaviors that are so confusing to the non-technical executive. It&#x27;s intimidating, but the good news is that many of the skills of a good manager are what&#x27;s necessary to achieve the necessary level of demystifying. The way that you begin to understand these layers of abstraction is through inquiry. Ask the right questions and, over time, you&#x27;ll understand more and more of how software development happens.

awesome

Ignoring the content, the structure of this article is amazing. It feels like an entire magazine in a single essay. The background animations that change as you scroll, the contextual content (try scrolling really fast). I&#x27;m not even all that keen on the bright oversaturated aesthetic, but it&#x27;s just so cool. I&#x27;d love to see a short piece on how they made it.

Intro articles like this do a lot to reveal biases and misunderstandings. Like with Java.<p>The article says &quot;Java= enterprise&quot; but I can tell you the best user experiences I ever saw delivered over the web were those done with Java Web Start (not applets- applications launched in a JVM from the web). I developed several in the day that continued to run for years- because users loved them and they were safe and secure.<p>Why Web Start didn&#x27;t take over, I have no idea. It was also a superb platform for mobile delivery.

I can&#x27;t understand the rationale behind this gaudy redesign job that Bloomberg carried out. I just can&#x27;t wrap my head around it. It just violates everything that I know about web design and usability for news&#x2F;corporate websites&#x2F;portals.<p>Maybe they were trying to pull off a Craigslist here but still I can&#x27;t really stomach these changes.

Good article. Sub par web design.

Watch it when capitalists pushing incessantly people to learn coding. They&#x27;re trying very hard to cut the costs of their input &quot;materials&quot; and they will do everything that they could to devalue us in every way possible.<p>So, if you&#x27;re a talented and competent dev, be super aggressive with these predators and take everything your hands can grab before they have the upper hand and show us their true colors.<p>Happy Coding!

Why did Bloomberg ask to use my camera while reading the article

&quot;How often are you going to be multiplying sevens and cats? Soooo much.&quot;<p>Where the fuck does this meme of &quot;fundamental type mismatches come up all the time in ordinary code&quot; come from? What kind of defective system are people writing where it&#x27;s <i>normal</i> for strings and numbers to be interpreted relationally (even accidentally)?<p>It sounds like the author is trying to demonstrate the significance of things like syntax transformations and format conversions (like transforming an email address to a mailto link), but that&#x27;s <i>nothing like</i> &quot;multiplying sevens and cats&quot;. It&#x27;s manipulating things that aren&#x27;t inherently incompatible - if <i>anything</i>, it&#x27;s multiplying sevens and &quot;7&quot;s.<p>All these batshit insane contrived examples in asides like <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;graphics&#x2F;2015-paul-ford-what-is-code&#x2F;#fn.14" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;graphics&#x2F;2015-paul-ford-what-is-cod...</a> do is make code seem <i>less</i> accessible and comprehensible to anybody who isn&#x27;t already intimately familiar with what&#x27;s safe to interpret as sarcasm or hyperbole and what&#x27;s not, which goes <i>exactly contrary</i> to the stated thesis of the article.

I&#x27;m glad I came here to read the comments that urged me to read on, because I stopped at the point where the VP was whining that his job was on the line and the software guy&#x27;s wasn&#x27;t. Made me a little sick to my stomach. In what company is that ever the case? Even if the VP&#x27;s job is lost (rare occurrence in my experience), the severance package is more than the software person&#x27;s salary for a year is.