UCL Press

Coderspeak

The language of computer programmers

Guilherme Orlandini Heurich

ISBN: 9781800085985

Publication: April 01, 2024

Open Access PDF £0.00 Hardback £40.00 Paperback £20.00

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Software applications have taken over our lives. We use and are used by software many times a day. Nevertheless, we know very little about the invisibly ubiquitous workers who write software. Who are they and how do they perceive their own practice? How does that shape the ways in which they collaborate to build the myriad of apps that we use every day? And how does that impact the users of apps?

Coderspeak provides a critical approach to the digital transformation of our world through an engaging and thoughtful analysis of the people who write software applications. It is a focused and in-depth look at one programming language and its community – Ruby - based on ethnographic research at a London company and conversations with members of the wider Ruby community in Europe, the Americas and Japan. This book shows that the place people write code, the language they write it in and the stories shared by that community are crucial in questioning and unpacking what it means to be a ‘coder’. Understanding this social group is essential if we are to grasp a future (and a present) in which computer programming increasingly dominates our lives.

Guilherme Orlandini Heurich is Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Anthropology, UCL.

Acknowledgments
Introduction

Part I: Open source
1 Principal engineer
2 Open source
3 The myth of rails
4 Half-broken monoliths
5 A new service

Part II: Meta languages
6 Language dreams
7 Meta programming
8 Happy programmers
9 Chunky bacon

Part III: Beyond binaries
10 Learning to see
11 Beautiful code
12 Computing gender
13 Proper programmers

Part IV: Tokyo days
14 Not my type
15 After the rain
16 Patch first
17 Supreme beings
18 The end

Glossary
Bibliography
Index

Format: Open Access PDF

186 Pages

2 B&W line drawings

ISBN: 9781800085985

Publication: April 01, 2024