This week Stack Overflow's CEO/founder Joel Spolsky spoke to Clive Thompson, the tech journalist who just published the new book Coders: the Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World . "It's a sort of ethnographic history of this particular tribe," explains a blog post at Stack Overflow, "examining how software developers fit into the world of business and culture and how their role in society has shifted in recent decades. "The official conversation kicked off after a 15-minute tangent on Joel's collection of Omni magazine and the formative role this publication had for both men." Some excerpts: Clive: The question in my mind is, who is interested in this' What gets them bit by the bug so they are willing to crawl over all the broken glass that is the daily work. Joel: In my time, it was the absolute control. Whatever code you wrote, that's what executed. There was no translation. It wasn't like, well the flour was kind of old, and I tried to make the souffle but it collapsed. Unlike so many things you will try to accomplish as a child or an adult, where you work on something but it doesn't turn out as you expect it to, with code it will do exactly what you told it. Even if that's not what you meant. You might suddenly realize you're obeying me to the point of making me angry. Clive: The monkey's paw thing. I shouldn't have wished for that. Joel: But the computer is still being completely obedient. Clive: That thrill is a common thread I found in my research, from the 1960s through today. I will talk to people in their 80s who worked on machines the size of an entire room, and it's the same damn thing talking to a 15-year-old girl at an afterschool program working on a raspberry pi or P5. There is something unique about the micro-world that is inside the machine, qualitatively different from our real world. Joel: It's sort of utopian. Things behave as they are supposed to. The reason I put a question mark on that, as programmers move higher and higher up the abstraction tree, that kinda goes away. Clive: I think the rise of machine learning is an interesting challenge to the traditional craft of software development. Some of the people I spoke with for the book aren't interested in it because they don't like the idea of working with these indeterminate training systems... there is something unsettling about not really knowing what's going on with what you're building. Joel: I just picked up Arduino a year ago and that was enormously fun because it was like going back to C, instead of all these fancy high-level languages where you don't know what they are going to do. It offered a really detailed level of control. If something doesn't work, you can figure it out, because everything is tractable. They also discussed the future of coding -- and took a fond look back at its past. Spolsky remembers his first exposure to computers was an interactive terminal system connected to a mainframe that ran FORTRAN, BASIC, and PL/I programs. "Many, many years later I realized there was no way they had enough memory for three compilers and in fact what they had was a very simple pre-processsor that made Basic, FORTRAN, and PL/I all look like the same mush. "It was a very crappy subset of each of those three languages."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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