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Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World Hardcover – 26 Mar. 2019
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Facebook's algorithms shaping the news. Self-driving cars roaming the streets. Revolution on Twitter and romance on Tinder. We live in a world constructed of code--and coders are the ones who built it for us. From 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. They are the most quietly influential people on the planet, and Coders shines a light on their culture.
In pop culture and media, the people who create the code that rules our world are regularly portrayed in hackneyed, simplified terms, as ciphers in hoodies. Thompson goes far deeper, dramatizing the psychology of the invisible architects of the culture, exploring their passions and their values, as well as their messy history. In nuanced portraits, Coders takes us close to some of the great programmers of our time, including the creators of Facebook's News Feed, Instagram, Google's cutting-edge AI, and more. Speaking to everyone from revered "10X" elites to neophytes, back-end engineers and front-end designers, Thompson explores the distinctive psychology of this vocation--which combines a love of logic, an obsession with efficiency, the joy of puzzle-solving, and a superhuman tolerance for mind-bending frustration.
Along the way, Coders thoughtfully ponders the morality and politics of code, including its implications for civic life and the economy. Programmers shape our everyday behavior: When they make something easy to do, we do more of it. When they make it hard or impossible, we do less of it. Thompson wrestles with the major controversies of our era, from the "disruption" fetish of Silicon Valley to the struggle for inclusion by marginalized groups.
In his accessible, erudite style, Thompson unpacks the surprising history of the field, beginning with the first coders -- brilliant and pioneering women, who, despite crafting some of the earliest personal computers and programming languages, were later written out of history. Coders introduces modern crypto-hackers fighting for your privacy, AI engineers building eerie new forms of machine cognition, teenage girls losing sleep at 24/7 hackathons, and unemployed Kentucky coal-miners learning a new career.
At the same time, the book deftly illustrates how programming has become a marvelous new art form--a source of delight and creativity, not merely danger. To get as close to his subject as possible, Thompson picks up the thread of his own long-abandoned coding skills as he reckons, in his signature, highly personal style, with what superb programming looks like.
To understand the world today, we need to understand code and its consequences. With Coders, Thompson gives a definitive look into the heart of the machine.
- Print length436 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin Pr
- Publication date26 Mar. 2019
- Dimensions16.21 x 3.45 x 24.33 cm
- ISBN-100735220565
- ISBN-13978-0735220560
Product description
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Penguin Pr (26 Mar. 2019)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 436 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0735220565
- ISBN-13 : 978-0735220560
- Dimensions : 16.21 x 3.45 x 24.33 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: 1,872,634 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 17,266 in Computing & Internet Programming
- 57,152 in Engineering & Technology
- Customer reviews:
About the author
Clive Thompson is a longtime contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired.
As a child growing up in Toronto of the 1970s and 80s, Clive Thompson became fascinated with the first “home computers”—the ones you plugged into your TV, like the Commodore 64, and programmed using BASIC. He was hooked, spending hours writing video games, music programs, and simple forms of artificial intelligence. The obsession stuck with him, even as he went to the University of Toronto to study poetry and political science. When he became a magazine writer in the 1990s, the Internet erupted into the mainstream, and he began reporting on how digital tools—everything from email to digital photography to instant messaging—was changing society.
Today, Thompson is one of the most prominent technology writers—respected for keeping his distance from Silicon Valley hype and doing deeply-reported, long-form magazine stories that get beyond headlines and harness the insights of science, literature, history and philosophy. In addition to the New York Times Magazine and Wired, he's a columnist for Smithsonian Magazine, writing about the history of technology, and writes features for Mother Jones. His journalism has won many awards -- including an Overseas Press Council Award and a Mirror Award -- and he's a former Knight Science Journalism Fellow.
In his spare time he’s also a recording and performing artist with the country/bluegrass band The Delorean Sisters.
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Uber staff had used an internal programme to help ex-boyfriends track the whereabouts of their ex-girlfriends. The book also provides insights into the lives and thinking of coders. Some are weird and some ‘make things that don’t see the light of day because nobody else can work with these people’. Programmers come from all walks of life – many are from well-to-do families. The book also points to some sexist problems in that female programmers are fewer than males, but there have been pockets of break-throughs. Some giddy ones even printed the T-shirt that read: ‘Who Hacked the World? GIRLS’.
This book also tracks cypherpunks and how in the early ‘80s hackers proliferated and the FBI began arresting them. One of those early hackers goes by the name of Phiber Optics. Cypherpunks have come a long way too. The next big fight was over the crypto code itself. The government is trying to make it illegal to even write certain kinds of software.
This book also discusses why and how Google beats Microsoft when it came to making a search engine. ‘Microsoft loved making precise, logical software…but Google was about sorting the internet’. They use statistics to make educated guesses. Then we have to deal with the social problems of social media. The section on trolls and what is being done is fascinating in its assessment of online harassment and what is being done about it.
We are reaching the point of in which who becomes a coder, and why, are the dominant questions of the day. Where will future programmers come from? Will there come a day when everyone will be a programmer?
Top reviews from other countries
At no other time in recent history has software and the people who make it been more critical to how we experience the world. Thanks to the current "pics or it didn't happen" mentality, Thompson's talent at digging into the personalities and the quirks of the mostly men (and the few women) who write the code that we rely on to stay in touch with loved ones, share experiences, shop, consume media, etc., should make readers to think about how the foundations of so much of daily life are produced.
He deftly exhumes the history of the software industry from its early days when coding was considered secretarial labor (and thus left to the ladies) to today's more male-dominated environment, where software bros chase the big score. He asks the right questions: Why did this happen and what was the effect of that shift? What are the knock-on impacts when coders are overwhelmingly white (or Asian), male, and convinced of their own overweening intelligence? Is the current, toxic environment found online solely because humans can be pretty awful to one another? Or is it because the guys who coded the platform just didn't think about online abuse because they never had to? Did that ignorance lead them to unwittingly enable the abuse, fake news, and mob culture we now have to endure? Thompson convincingly argues that a fair amount of that ignorance is at fault.
Ultimately, code doesn't just happen; humans with their weirdo attitudes, biases, ideologies, and faults write it, and they tend to encode into the code itself those very same attitudes, biases, ideologies, and faults -- whether they mean to or not. That's why it's important to understand the history of coders and the code they write. Given how important software is to the modern world -- a glitch at one airport can disrupt airline traffic all over the world, just to name one recent example -- we also have to know who the authors are.
Thompson's book does that, and with a verve, style, and brisk pace that makes Coders a readable, engaging, and valuable addition to this field of study.