For this reason the actual process by which coal is extracted is well worth watching, if you get the chance and are willing to take the trouble. He is a sort of caryatid upon whose shoulders nearly everything that is not grimy is supported. In the metabolism of the Western world the coal-miner is second in importance only to the man who ploughs the soil.
The machines that keep us alive, and the machines that make machines, are all directly or indirectly dependent upon coal. Our civilization, pace Chesterton, is founded on coal, more completely than one realizes until one stops to think about it. I read a lot of George Orwell early in my career but I’d forgotten this passage, which Brad DeLong hoisted into the light of blog last year: Writing about the act of programming itself is as difficult as writing about any act of writing: the subject is an essentially interior process between the mind and the page (or screen), and it’s highly resistant to illumination.Ĭonsider the difference when the topic of an essay is a rough physical act - like, say, digging coal out of the ground. Others don’t think I did, and some days I agree with the criticism. I’m grateful that a good number of the book’s readers who’ve posted their thoughts feel that I achieved that goal. But I also wanted to create a journalistic record of the day-to-day experience of the software developer at the start of the 21st century - to tell a story about the act of programming itself. I wrote Dreaming in Code because I believed that, as Bjarne Stroustrup says, “our civilization is built on software.” I noticed that creating software remains stubbornly difficult in certain ways, and, despite its centrality to our civilization, our understanding of that difficulty remains deficient.
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