145.366 - 2016 project and code

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

code

once upon a time the world was very different from anything we know.  we hadn't yet invented computers, but knew a lot about them.  you see, a brilliant and eccentric mechanical engineer named Charles Babbage had all but invented one back around 1820.  it should've worked, it might've worked, if he could've gotten machine parts built to his exacting specifications, and if he'd worked out the details.  that turned out to be tedious and crazy-making and eventually Charles Babbage lost interest in what several people had sunk a lot of money into.  not a good idea, although he'd had an even more brilliant idea for how to build a computer.  sigh.  to our great good luck, though, he'd intrigued a brilliant young woman, the Lady Ada, Countess of Lovelace, who apparently sat down and wrote the ideas for writing code for his machine, and all by herself invented programming computers.  her ideas were still the foundation of computing theory as late as when I last worked in programming computers, and certainly were as late as when I taught computing theory in the 1980s.  how influential was she?  when the people who invented FORTRAN and COBOL got together to invent what they expected would be the language to end all languages for computers, they named it Ada.  do I appreciate code?  I didn't have to look up any of that history except the date, roughly 1820.  I wrote code for at least twenty years, and loved every minute or writing and testing and improving code.  in my moments of craziness, I thought computers had been invented so I could write code.  after those intense twenty years of writing code, I wrote code occasionally and often during the other 26 years of my career.  it was still a thrill.  I'd write code now, except that's not what people do any more.  this month, some guy wrote in WIRED magazine prophesying the end of code.  he could be right.  the world moves on and car drivers don't need buggywhips.  the buggywhip braiders have to find other things to do.  but damn, some of them smile and wish they could tell how wonderful it was twisting leather into a whip!