If you are a typical person interacting with most technology, your only concern is that it "just works," as Steve Jobs liked to say of Apple products. But that simple metric wasn't enough to satisfy journalist Andrew Smith. The product of his curiosity is Devil in the Stack, a fascinating journey into the world of computer code, its history, the people who create it, some of its current controversies, and its implications for the future of society.
Smith's four-year odyssey in what he calls the microcosmos is so engrossing, in part, because he's not content to be a bystander in the coding process. Instead, with refreshing self-deprecation, he describes his halting steps toward acquiring proficiency in the art, a task that finds him settling on the language known as Python, whose creator, Dutch programmer Guido van Rossum, is one of a roster of key programming figures he interviews.
With insight and wit, Smith recounts his immersion in this sometimes strange fraternity, as he attends Python's annual conferences and participates in PyWeek, its biannual game-creating competition. This is all part of a broader exploration of the subject of open-source software, illuminating both the beauty of its collaborative aspects and the frequent challenges to realizing them. By the end of his book, as the Covid pandemic explodes in March 2020, Smith has progressed sufficiently in his often frustrating education to become immersed in writing code for a Covid dashboard for residents of the Bay Area, where he lives.
For all his passion for coding, he doesn't shy away from controversial topics in the field. He calls out the "staggering homogeneity within the profession," reflected in that fact that a mere 7% of coders are women, while less than 3% are Black, and describes the real world consequences of this lack of diversity. He also investigates whether a certain personality type or brain structure makes someone especially adept at writing code, submitting to fMRI brain scans in Germany and at MIT by researchers trying to answer that question. Smith devotes considerable attention to the urgent subject of algorithms and artificial intelligence, a misnomer he insists should be abandoned for the term machine learning. While he avoids the more apocalyptic aspects of that topic, he doesn't shy aware from its dark side.
In taking readers on an intellectually stimulating guided tour of the sometimes exotic world of programming, Smith (Totally Wired) hopes to "open a broad discussion of what we want code to do for us and what we don't." Anyone who's curious about the why and how of what makes computers do what they do will find Devil in the Stack a fertile introduction. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: Journalist Andrew Smith embarks on a long and winding journey through the world of computer coding.