WORLD WORLDEVERYONE IS a friggin computer coder these days. What's that about. We can spend all day going into the market forces that lead to a bloated tech center that is primarily occupied by Tech giants cornering the IQ market and spectulative bets from investors and the governement banking on the black swan success of the well established tech giants ubiquitous today. But today I want to take time to understand the metaphysics of coding and why it was always going to end up this way.
Just the other day I was part of a very casual converstation with coworkers about college. We are all tech people and the idea of general education courses came up and it was met with the usual frusterization. "I will never use anything I used in those classes". When was the last time you had a disagreement with someone? Likely about politics, but did you really get into it? Did you address their arguments directly? Were you able to forum cohesive reasoning for why you believe your way of thinking was correct? I find myself backed against a wall in those conversation. I feel strongly something is true, but I haven't taken the time to parse that out into a map from A to B. Have you ever struggled to contextualize an emotionally intense experience? Is there a vivid memory of yours the immediately induces a strong emotion response? Are there situation you play over and over in your head trying not to forget the detail, wishing you had handled things differently? I know that sometime my emotions are too much to keep inside and will prevent me from sleeping until I have recorded them somewhere else. It's impossible to capture all the details of my vivid pictoral memory, but as long I get the story I can usually sleep. Memory is untrust worth and concious thought is necesarily limited. Similar to a computer we can only have so much running at a give time. We have to offload it if we hope to make progress, to build ontop of previous thoughts, we need to store the active ones to make room. Writing in the human thought equivalent of saving a file. The process is fuzzier, but because of that the noise in the thoughts can be reduced. revisiting previous writing can partially restore the state of mind when the work was writtin, but it also gets rid of anything that was deemed unnecesary to put down, leaving room for new thoughts to accompany the old writing. This effected is amplified to a greater degree when the reader isnt' the writer. The bane of an interpreters' existance and one of many tools in the arsenal of brilliant literary figures. The ability to start with small ideas, refine them, expand them, branch from them is essential for complex thought. As technology becomes more and more ubiq uitous we have found this is even true for computer systems.
It is bad practice to work in science/math/engineering and not write code. Being able to programatically iterate and validate your ideas allow for a greater understanding of the problem itself and it creates a tangible scaffold of your work. It is not to say that technical writing isn't just as imporant for the same reasons listed above, or that written logic using mathematical expressions doesn't serve some of the same purpose in specific contexts, or that computation or simulation replaces empirical evidence. Code has the ability to objectively evaluate the validity of your ideas. Have you create what you set out to? YES/NO. Does you hypothesis evaluate out to what you claim it will? YES/NO. A computer will tell you when you are wrong and that is perhaps its most important feature. And once it tells you you are right, you are right definitively (at least in this context). SIDE NOTE: One of the exhilerating appeals of programming is that it tells you you are wrong without a shread of pity. I think the crushing cold evaluation of a computer is one of the reasons young men are so attracted to them For any problem of meaningful size you may have a rough idea of what you are trying to build, but as you actually start to reason about it through code, you begin to need answers for question you have never