Coders: Who They Are, What They Think and How They Are Changing Our World

Description

You use software nearly every instant you're awake. And this may sound weirdly obvious, but every single one of those pieces of software was written by a programmer. Programmers are thus among the most quietly influential people on the planet. As we live in a world made of software, they're the architects. The decisions they make guide our behaviour. When they make something newly easy to do, we do a lot more of it. If they make it hard to do something, we do less of it. If we want to understand how today's world works, we ought to understand something about coders. Who exactly are the people building today's world? What makes them tick? What type of personality is drawn to writing software? And perhaps most interestingly - what does it do to them? One of the first pieces of coding a newbie learns is the program to make the computer say, 'Hello, world!' Like that piece of code, Clive Thompson's Coders is a delightful place to begin to understand this vocation, which is both a profession and a way of life, and which essentially didn't exist little more than a generation ago, but now is considered just about the only safe bet we can make about what the future holds. Thompson takes us close to some of the great coders of our time, and unpacks the surprising history of the field, beginning with the first great coders, who were women. Ironically, if we're going to traffic in stereotypes, women are arguably 'naturally' better at coding than men, but they were written out of the history, and shoved out of the seats, for reasons that are illuminating. Now programming is indeed if not a pure brotopia, at least an awfully homogenous community, which attracts people from a very narrow band of backgrounds and personality types. As Thompson learns, the consequences of that are significant - not least being a fetish for disruption at scale that doesn't leave much time for pondering larger moral issues of collateral damage. At the same time, coding is a marvellous new art form that has improved the world in innumerable ways, and Thompson reckons deeply, as no one before him has, with what great coding in fact looks like, who creates it, and where they come from. To get as close to his subject has he can, he picks up the thread of his own long-abandoned coding practice, and tries his mightiest to up his game, with some surprising results. More and more, any serious engagement with the world demands an engagement with code and its consequences, and to understand code, we must understand coders.

Clive Thompson is a longtime contributing writer for the New York Times magazine and a columnist for Wired. He is the author of Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better.

Fascinating. Thompson is an excellent writer and his subjects are themselves gripping... Many books have covered this territory, but Coders is bang up to date in a fast-moving world... Perhaps [coders will] give it to loved ones, with a note attached: "Read this, that's me!" * Nature * Clive Thompson is more than a gifted reporter and writer. He is a brilliant social anthropologist. And, in this masterful book, he illuminates both the fascinating coders and the bewildering technological forces that are transforming the world in which we live. -- David Grann, author of The Lost City of Z With an anthropologist's eye, [Thompson] outlines [coders'] different personality traits, their history and cultural touchstones. He explores how they live, what motivates them and what they fight about. By breaking down what the actual world of coding looks like . . . he removes the mystery and brings it into the legible world for the rest of us to debate. Human beings and their foibles are the reason the internet is how it is - for better and often, as this book shows, for worse. * New York Times * With his trademark clarity and insight, Clive Thompson gives us an unparalleled vista into the mind-set and culture of programmers, the often-invisible architects and legislators of the digital age. -- Steven Johnson, author of How We Got to Now It's a delight to follow Clive Thompson's roving, rollicking mind anywhere. When that "anywhere" is the realm of the programmers, the pleasure takes on extra ballast. Coders is an engrossing, deeply clued-in ethnography, and it's also a book about power, a new kind: where it comes from, how it feels to wield it, who gets to try - and how all that is changing. -- Robin Sloan, author of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore Before I read this brilliantly accessible book . . . coding was something of a foggy concept to me . . . There are strings of engaging insights into the anthropology of computer programmers. * Bookseller * An avalanche of profiles, stories, quips, and anecdotes in this beautifully reported book returns us constantly to people, their stories, their hopes and thrills and disappointments . . . Fun to read, this book knows its stuff and makes it fun to learn. "If we want to understand how today's world works," Thompson writes in his introduction, "we ought to understand something about coders." His book . . . ensures, delightfully, that we can. * Philadelphia Inquirer *