"You Are Not Expected to Understand This"
Ratings1
Average rating1
Leading technologists, historians, and journalists reveal the stories behind the computer coding that touches all aspects of life—for better or worse Few of us give much thought to computer code or how it comes to be. The very word “code” makes it sound immutable or even inevitable. “You Are Not Expected to Understand This” demonstrates that, far from being preordained, computer code is the result of very human decisions, ones we all live with when we use social media, take photos, drive our cars, and engage in a host of other activities. Everything from law enforcement to space exploration relies on code written by people who, at the time, made choices and assumptions that would have long-lasting, profound implications for society. Torie Bosch brings together many of today’s leading technology experts to provide new perspectives on the code that shapes our lives. Contributors discuss a host of topics, such as how university databases were programmed long ago to accept only two genders, what the person who programmed the very first pop-up ad was thinking at the time, the first computer worm, the Bitcoin white paper, and perhaps the most famous seven words in Unix history: “You are not expected to understand this.” This compelling book tells the human stories behind programming, enabling those of us who don’t think much about code to recognize its importance, and those who work with it every day to better understand the long-term effects of the decisions they make. With an introduction by Ellen Ullman and contributions by Mahsa Alimardani, Elena Botella, Meredith Broussard, David Cassel, Arthur Daemmrich, Charles Duan, Quinn DuPont, Claire L. Evans, Hany Farid, James Grimmelmann, Katie Hafner, Susan C. Herring, Syeda Gulshan Ferdous Jana, Lowen Liu, John MacCormick, Brian McCullough, Charlton McIlwain, Lily Hay Newman, Margaret O’Mara, Will Oremus, Nick Partridge, Benjamin Pope, Joy Lisi Rankin, Afsaneh Rigot, Ellen R. Stofan, Lee Vinsel, Josephine Wolff, and Ethan Zuckerman.
Reviews
Popular Reviews
Reviews with the most likes.
Fact #1: As a rule, I refuse to DNF books. I would estimate that the ratio of books which I put down and say, “Nope, I'm done.” is about 1:150. I put books down all the time, but that's because I read like an ADHD howler monkey on cocaine, surrounded by the many shiny objects which comprise our ever-increasing shared literary heritage. My intent is always to pick them back up at a later date.
Fact #2: As a rule, I do not write reviews of books which I have not read front to back.
Fact #3: I have no problem viewing women as equals, and in the case of individual skills, betters. I've never understood the need to denigrate women. Accuse me of misogyny if you want — and some will want to by the end of this review — but I have no problem with the ongoing sexual revolution.
Fact #4: I was very much in the mood for an intellectually stimulating book on programming, a perhaps philosophical smorgasbord of interesting and at times fascinating essays and stories about the history of computers and that surprisingly engaging pastime some of us engage in known as programming.
Fact #5: This book — or what I read of it — seems to be (wait for it...) an intellectually stimulating book on programming, a perhaps philosophical smorgasbord of interesting and at times fascinating essays and stories about the history of computers and that surprisingly engaging pastime some of us engage in known as programming.
Fact #6: But the women (and perhaps some men) involved in the production of this book ruined it. Instead what we have is actually a smokescreen. The authors and most certainly the editors of the book wanted you to think this was a book about programming but actually this was a book about the contributions of women to programming, and any actual entertainment value derived from the book about the fascinating subject of programming was purely accidental. They had an ax to grind and they ground it at every available opportunity.
Fact #7: If they had written a book about the contributions of women to the discipline of programming and billed it as such, I might have read it, finished it, and then praised it. Assuming of course it was well-written. But instead they tried to backdoor an agenda in there, reminding the reader continuously of the unfairness of being a women.
For anyone interested, I put do the book down at this paragraph:
“““
During the first half of 1964, two college-age White men, John McGeachie and Michael Busch, devoted hours to computer programming. So much time, in fact, that McGeachie was known as 225, short for the GE-225 mainframe computer for which he was responsible, and Busch was known as 30, short for the GE Datanet-30 computer that he programmed. They were students at Dartmouth, an elite, overwhelmingly White, Ivy League college that admitted only men as undergraduates, and they were coding a new computing network. In the early 1960s, McGeachie's and Busch's access to technology was extraordinary.
”””
