Coders Quotes

“For years, coders have been programming computers so that they perform repetitive tasks for us. Now they automate our repetitive thoughts.”
― Clive Thompson, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World

“Research by the Harvard professor Teresa M. Amabile and researcher Steven J. Kramer has found that employees are happiest at jobs where they experience “the power of small wins”—regular, daily, visible progress.”
― Clive Thompson, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World

“More than introversion or logic, though, coding selects for people who can handle endless frustration.”
― Clive Thompson, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World

“the first ENIAC programmer team was all-female: Kathleen McNulty, Betty Jennings, Elizabeth Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Frances Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman, known later as the “ENIAC Girls.”
― Clive Thompson, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World

“you always take pride in your code. You should always be refactoring it, it should look like you’ve been working on it, when people see it,” he said. A single flabbily written function would convey something other than total commitment to the craft. “I’m a firm believer in the broken-windows theory. You find a bug, you hunt it down and kill it.”
― Clive Thompson, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World

“Of course, there are obvious dangers to this seductive, Manichean world of the machine. Spend enough time in a world where pure logic and rigorous structure reign; where persuasion doesn’t work, and can’t; and you can wind up developing habits of mind that feel half machine themselves.”
― Clive Thompson, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World

“Back in the ’80s, MIT’s pioneering educational theorist Seymour Papert argued that computer programming constituted a mode of thought deeply useful to children. Much as you learn French best by living in a place where it’s spoken daily (a French land, like Paris), you learn logic and math and systematic thinking by living in a “Mathland”—which is, essentially, computer programming.”
― Clive Thompson, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World

“Software,” as the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has proclaimed, “is eating the world.” It’s true. You use software nearly every instant you’re awake. There’s the obvious stuff, like your phone, your laptop, email and social networking and video games and Netflix, the way you order taxis and food. But there’s also less-obvious software lurking all around you. Nearly any paper book or pamphlet you touch was designed using software; code inside your car helps manage the braking system; “machine-learning” algorithms at your bank scrutinize your purchasing activity to help spy the moment when a criminal dupes your card and starts fraudulently buying things using your money. And this may sound weirdly obvious, but every single one of those pieces of software was written by a programmer—someone precisely like Ruchi Sanghvi or Mark Zuckerberg. Odds are high the person who originally thought of the product was a coder: Programmers spend their days trying to get computers to do new things, so they’re often very good at understanding the crazy what-ifs that computers make possible. (What if you had a computer take every word you typed and, quietly and constantly and automatically in the background, checked it against a dictionary of common English words? Hello, spell-check!) Sometimes it seems that the software we use just sort of sprang into existence, like grass growing on the lawn. But it didn’t. It was created by someone who wrote out—in code—a long, painstaking set of instructions telling the computer precisely what to do, step-by-step, to get a job done. There’s a sort of priestly class mystery cultivated around the word algorithm, but all they consist of are instructions: Do this, then do this, then do this. News Feed is now an extraordinarily complicated algorithm involving some trained machine learning; but it’s ultimately still just a list of rules. So the rule makers have power. Indeed, these days, the founders of high-tech companies—the ones who determine what products get created, what problems get solved, and what constitutes a “problem” in the first place—are increasingly technologists, the folks who cut their teeth writing endless lines of code and who cobbled together the prototype for their new firm themselves. Programmers are thus among the most quietly influential people on the planet.”
― Clive Thompson, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World

“quintessentially American—simultaneously wholesome and insane.”
― Clive Thompson, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World

“When you meet a coder, you're meeting someone whose core daily experience is of unending failure and grinding frustration.”
― Clive Thompson, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World

“Never before in history have basically fifty mostly men, mostly twenty to thirty-five, mostly white engineer designer types within fifty miles of where we are right now, had control of what a billion people think and do when they wake up in the morning and turn their phone over . . . Who’s the Jane Jacobs of this attention city?”
― Clive Thompson, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World

“Many coders were young and coming out of the already antiauthoritarian counterculture of the ’60s. When you put these kids in charge of important machines that their managers didn’t understand, it was a recipe for insolence—or, as Brandon noted, employees who were “excessively independent.” The average programmer, Brandon continued, was “often egocentric, slightly neurotic, and he borders upon a limited schizophrenia. The incidence of beards, sandals, and other symptoms of rugged individualism or nonconformity are notably greater among this demographic group.”
― Clive Thompson, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World