The Devil in the Stack
Andrew Smith . August 2024 . Beaverton Lib. 005.1 SMI
British-born 1961 Andrew Smith
My first glance at this book was off-putting - I somehow got the idea that the author thought perjoratively about programmers and technologists. The book is actually a journalist making a deep and sincere dive into software, the communities of people who create and maintain it, and how they think about it.
pXI Prologue, 2013 and Bitcoin , pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto
- pXIII Bitcoin uses C++
pXIV Bitcoin exegesis: Satoshi not C++ native, learned to code in 1980s, mixed US/British spellings
pXV Russian(s)? Vladislav Surkov? Putin’s Rasputinreflexive control
pXXVIII TV shows Silicon ValleyMr. RobotRussian Doll 10Xer 5% women 3% black
pXXVIII Facebook Myanmar genocideIndiaSri Lanka
.p001 Ch.01 Revenge of the SpaghettiOs
- p001 1700 to 9000 programming languages
p002 freeCodeCamp 2014 Quincy Larson
p002 trio of web languages: HTML CSS JavaScript
- p003 shift-devil: dash that should have been underscore
p005 Pascal case Camel case
p005 lorem ipsum
- p007 programming is never easy ... accept that feeling -- of being constantly wrong and not knowing
- p008 ... exposes me as probably no smarter than an economist.
p0011 Gerald Weinberg The Psychology of Computer Programming
.p013 Ch.02 Holy Grail
p016 Bloomberg essay What is code?
p018 Nicholas Tollervey Don't let anyone tell you code is not political
p018 Zen of Python
- p019 There should be one - and preferably only one - obvious way to do it. Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
.p021 Ch.03 PyLadies and Code Freaks
p021 Young travelmate Alex, maintains websites using the Django web framework (like MoinMoin, coded in Python)
p022 Author's new home in Marin, where crimes are harshing a mellow without a license, and gluten smuggling
p022 ecstatic dance group ... sensei
p025 Naomi Ceder
p027 Recurse center in Brooklyn, phrase "well actually" banned
p027 San Quentin The Last Mile
p028 Bikeshedding
p028 bike shedding yak shaving
p030 PyLadies
p036 Lynn Root painting charity-auctioned for $16, $32, $64 ... $512 ... $1410 !!
.p038 Ch.04 Minutely Organized Particulars
.p046 Ch.05 The Real Moriarty
p059 Great Hunger 1845-1852
- homeless in the streets while academics and church elders dined luxuriously
.p066 Ch.06 The New Mind Readers
- p067 Post-Brexit Überschwemmung (flooding, presumably of coders from England to the continent)
p068 Anti-immigration riots in Chemnitz 2018
p068 2018 Google data breach private data of 500,000 uw34w
p070 Dr. Janet Siegmund learning coder brain scans
p070 programming education high drop out rate (50% is "astronomical?" Higher for Medicine, Engineering, Architecture, Law, and Accounting)
p072 André Brechmann Combinatorial NeuroImaging, Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology, Magdeburg
p073 Java -> Python Norman Peitek
p073 artHOTEL Magdeburg
- p075 axon transmission rate 50% ??
- p078 computer code comprehension activates brain areas for working memory, problem-solving, and language processing, left hemisphere for most right-handers
- same areas for natural language and general analytical processing
- no left hemisphere for mathematical thinking
- p078 Dijkstra "An exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset for a competent programmer."
- p079 "...some computer science students are hardly able to talk, to form whole sentences when they come to us/"
- p079 "... you can't train them. All you can do is find them and let them loose"
- p081 "Homework ... was to memorize the assigned program ... to write it out perfectly."
- p081 "... this is how we acquire language"
p082 Gerald Weinberg The psychology of computer programming an approach that works for one person may not work for another
p082 Russell A. Poldrack The New Mind Readers Central 616.07548 P7629n 2018
.p084 Ch.07 Theories of Memory
p085 Bletchley Park
- "Auntie Flo is not so well" message summoned 200 code breakers, 10,000 by war's end, 75% women
p087 Lorenz cipher, Tunny, Tunafish, intercepts called "fish"
p087 Turingery
p088 Turing machine "universal computing machine"
p089 John von Neumann
- OCD, drawers and light switches flips
p093 "dissembling"?? movie The Imitation Game
p093 not Turing's, but Max Newman's design, nicknamed Heath Robinson
p093 Colossus Tommy Flowers 1500? 1800? vacuum tubes
- p094 paper tape input, 5000 characters per second, programmed with a switchboard in front and a plugboard in back
p095 In 2009 Benjamin Wells hypothesized a cluster of 10 Mk II machines would have been Turing complete
- p095 Confirmed that Hitler expected D-Day landings at Calais rather than Normandy, so Eisenhower launched D-Day the next day. Colossus shortened the war by years and countless lives.
p096 Oswald Veblen nephew of Thorstein Veblen
p096 Artillery range table computation on ENIAC at University of Pennsylvania Moore School of Electrical Engineering
- p096 Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer 17K vacuum tubes, thirty tons, Turing Complete
p096 Adele Goldstine project administrator
- p098 exemplar professional and mother, daughter Marina
- p098 Programming took weeks, plugboard cabling and 4000 ten-position switches
- p099 six programmers learned ENIAC using the schematics, and diagnosed troubles to individual vacuum tubes
- p100 subroutines. nesting, loops
- p101 ENIAC 1945 December modelling thermonuclear explosion, one month, one million punch cards
p101 Stan Ulam
p105 UNIVAC for United States Census Bureau in 1951
- p110 author's 32 GB laptop
p111 Charles Petzoldwebsite Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software Beaverton 004 PET 2023
p112 Konrad Zuse
p113 Robert C. Martin 2016 The Future of Programming
- two major hardware transformsations since 1950s, no radical advances in software writing technology
p114 Julian Bigelow Theories of Memory (essay? where?), history of the IAS project
- p115 von Neumann bottleneck, instructions and memory in time series are slower
- p116 von Neumann, we are "creating a monster"
p117 German Navy Enigma 4th rotor in 1942, Dieppe raid (overseen by Ian Fleming) ... attempt to capture codebook?
p118 Tony Sale model Colossus at National Museum of Computing
.p126 Ch.08 Hilarity Ensues
p126 Lecture by Thomas Baldwin
about Satre'sBeing and Nothingness
.p159 Ch.09 Catch 32
.p159 Ch.10 A New Kind of Gentleness
.p213 Ch.11 The Gun on the Mantlepiece
.p236 Ch.12 Code Rush
.p265 Ch.13 Enter the Frankenalgorithm
.p287 Ch.14 Algorave?
.p300 Ch.15 A Codemy of Errors
.p320 Ch.16 Do Algos Dream of Numeric Sheep?: An AI Suite
.p375 Ch.17 Apologies to Richard Feynman
.p392 Ch.18 A Cloud Lifts
.p405 Ch.19 Strange Loops and Abstractions: The Devil in the Stack
.p421 Select Bibliography