A writer with no technical background recounts his incredible journey into the realm of coding and its lessons about the modern world
A writer with no technical background recounts his incredible journey into the realm of coding and the invaluable lesson it taught him about the modern world
There was also a third possibility, one I barely dared contemplate because the prospect of it was so appalling. What if there was something about the way we compute that was at odds with the way humans are? I’d never heard anyone suggest such a possibility, but in theory, at least, it was there. Slowly, it became clear that the only way to find out would be to climb inside the machine by learning to code myself.
It seemed there could be rivalry, even mild animosity, between these tribes, a friction coders half-jokingly referred to as “religious wars” on the grounds that no one was ever going to change their mind. Suddenly, the coder’s realm looked rich and intriguing. Later, I spoke to a theoretical physicist who had been studying “high frequency trading” on the stock market, wherein algorithms working outside human control fight to fool one another as to the market’s state.
The first day was less like the stiff gathering of my imagining than the first day back at Hogwarts. I met up with Tollervey, who graduated from the Royal College of Music as a tuba player before pivoting to code – the kind of backstory I’d hear often at PyCon.
I was surprised how much fun I had with the Pythonistas. Coding has a gender and race problem, with only about 5% of professionals identifying as women or either Black, African or Caribbean. It would take me several years to get to the bottom of why this is. But strenuous efforts were being made to address the problem within Python communities around the world, notably in Africa.
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