As Thompson learns, the consequences of that are significant - not least being a fetish for disruption at scale that doesn’t leave much time for pondering larger moral issues of collateral damage. Now programming is indeed, if not a pure brotopia, at least an awfully homogeneous community, which attracts people from a very narrow band of backgrounds and personality types. Ironically, if we’re going to traffic in stereotypes, women are arguably 'naturally' better at coding than men, but they were written out of the history and shoved out of the seats, for reasons that are illuminating. Thompson takes us close to some of the great coders of our time and unpacks the surprising history of the field, beginning with the first great coders, who were women. One of the first pieces of coding a newbie learns is the program to make the computer say 'Hello, world!' Like that piece of code, Clive Thompson’s Coders is a delightful place to begin to understand this vocation, which is both a profession and a way of life and which essentially didn’t exist little more than a generation ago, but now is considered just about the only safe bet we can make about what the future holds.

Who exactly are the people that are building today’s world? What makes them tick? What type of personality is drawn to writing software? And perhaps most interestingly - what does it do to them? If we want to understand how today’s world works, we ought to understand something about coders. If they make it hard or impossible to do something, we do less of it. When they make something newly easy to do, we do a lot more of it. The decisions they make guide our behavior. As we live in a world made of software, they’re the architects.

Programmers are thus among the most quietly influential people on the planet. And this may sound weirdly obvious, but every single one of those pieces of software was written by a programmer. You use software nearly every instant you’re awake.

Coders clive thompson