Nice grey life

We, Programmers A Chronicle of Coders from Ada to AI

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When this book was presented as available to review, I jumped for it: who does not love reading a nice bit of computing history, as told by a well-known author (affectionaly known as “Uncle Bob”), one that has been immersed in computing since forever… What is not to like there?

Reading on, the book does not disappoint. Much to the contrary, it digs into details absent in most computer history books that, being an Operating Systems and Computer Architecture geek, I absolutely enjoyed. But let me first address the book’s organization.

The book is split in four parts. Part 1, “Setting the stage” is a short introduction, answering the questioun “Who are we?” (addressing “we” as the programmers, of course), describing the fascination most of us has ever felt when realizing the computer was there to obey us, to do our bidding, and we could absolutely control it.

Part 2, “The Giants”, talks about the Giants our computing world owes to, and on whose shoulders we stand on. It digs with a level of detail I had never seen before in the personal life and technical contributions (as well as the hoops they had to jump through to get their work done). Nine chapters cover “Giants” ranging chronologically from Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace to Ken Thompson, Dennis Richie and Brian Kernighan (of course, several giants who did their contribution together are grouped in the same chapter). This is the part with most historic technical details often overlooked — What was the word size in the first computers, before even the concept of a “byte” had been brought into regular use? What was the register structure of early CPUs, and why did it lead to requiring self-modifying code to be able to execute loops?

Then, just as Unix and C get invented, Part 3 skips to computer history as seen by the eyes of “Uncle Bob”. I must admit the change of rhythm initially startled me, but it went through quite well. The focus was no longer in the Giants of the field, but on one particular person who… Casts a very long shadow. The narrative follows the author’s career, since being a boy given access to electronics by his father’s line of work, until he becomes a computing industry leader in the early 2000s with Extreme Programming and becoming among the first producers of training material in video format, something today might be recognized as an “influencer”. This first-person narrative reaches year 2023.

But the book is not just a historical overview of the computing world, of course. “Uncle Bob” has a final section with his thoughts for the future of computing. Being this a book for programmers, it is fitting to start by talking about changes in programming languages we should expect to see towards the future and where such changes are prone to take place. Second, the unavoidable topic of Artificial Intelligence is presented: What is it and what does it spell for computing, and in particular, for programming? Third, what does the future of hardware development look like? Fourth, mostly to my surprise, what is prone to be the evolution of the World Wide Web, and finally, what is the future of programming — and programmers.

At 480 pages, the book is a volume to be taken seriously. But space is very well used with this text. The material is easy to read, often funny, but always informative. If you enjoy computer history and understanding the little details in the implementations, it might very well be the book you want.

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