Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software

by Petzold Charles

The key word here is two. Two types of blinks, two vowel sounds, two different anything, really, can with suitable combinations convey all types of information.

The title of Boole’s 1854 book suggests an ambitious motivation: Because the rational human brain uses logic to think, if we were to find a way in which logic can be represented by mathematics, we would also have a mathematical description of how the brain works. Of course, nowadays this view of the mind seems to us quite naive. (Either that or it’s way ahead of its time.)

The human species is often amazingly inventive and industrious but at the same time profoundly lazy. It’s very clear that we humans don’t like to work. This aversion to work is so extreme—and our ingenuity so acute—that we’re eager to devote countless hours designing and building devices that might shave a few minutes off our workday. Few fantasies tickle the human pleasure center more than a vision of relaxing in a hammock watching some newfangled contraption we just built mow the lawn.

What makes the difference is the conditional jump. Controlled repetition or looping is what separates computers from calculators.