Why I code (Part 1)

Knowing "Cellar Door" is a beautiful phonetic construct or why Mr. Wickham is unsuited to Elizabeth Bennet whereas Mr. Darcy is, won't increase your salary. English literature won't help you climb the greasy corporate pole as a journalist or screen-writer.

Think so? Then think again. However, the reasons are not at all obvious and are certainly not measurable. The same applies to code.

Read a dozen online guides to great writing. Ask an "AI". They won't tell you anything much useful. Even George Orwell's extraordinary "Politics and the English Language", which I've thrust down the throats of my students for over 30 years, is just a stylistic guide. Choosing words, structuring essays, grabbing attention… none of that matters because the real goal is to knowing why you read and write.

Likewise read Steve McConnell's Code Complete or Abelson and Sussman's Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. You'll learn a lot about how to write code, but nothing that tells you why you really might want to.

"I suppose I read for a lot of reasons, one of the main ones being so I don't end up being a fucking waffle waitress" – Bill Hicks

Our schools continue to teach English Literature for sublime benefits. We must learn to hear and tell stories because fables not facts are the atomic units of human understanding. Literature gives us cultural landmarks. We learn to parse narratives, appreciate irony, decode characters and thus understand ourselves as people in the world living amongst others. Reading bestows a set of high level cognitive skills that are ineffable and still uncharted by the technocrats.

People who read have richer more complex inner lives. They make better decisions in life. They appreciate the outcomes more, including feeling the sting of regrets more harshly. Social, moral and emotional intelligence bears costs and benefits.

Learning to read is necessary but incidental, because the ability to read is gained as a side effect of reading. What?! That self-referential insight does not fit into any rationalist/positivist account of education because it breaks the 'logic' of simpler folk. It requires a powerful education model to gain, as Paulo Freire would say, knowledge that you 'cannot bank', and all the more so with code where two worlds collide, the healthiness of human desire and the madness of pure logic.

Of course I'm pissing all over the conceit of "instrumental education" here. I've watched three, maybe four generations of young people robbed of purposeful life by chasing "a good career".

And indeed there are 'negative sides' that the detractors of literature will wheel-out. Literature breeds elitism and cultural cliques, they say. Wrong! Both Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky relayed extensive research on how the working classes have traditionally always been more literate than the aristocracy. Manual workers hired readers and became very learned during tedious repetitive workdays - much as podcasts relieve intellectual tedium today. By contrast, wealthy men considered reading a vice of effete intellectuals and women.

A rich literary foundation and a wide, expressive knowledge of different languages is a survival tool. Speaking the Welsh language, while their captors spoke only English enabled Welsh guardsmen to endure torture and eventually escape from a POW camp.

It's no accident that communists attack language and impose standardised narratives. Violence toward literacy is at the heart of many of George Orwell's themes. Equally today, it is corporate culture that most aggressively polices language, spins codes of conduct, reviles swearing and tries to regiment thought into its own tortured Procrustean pallor.

Understanding the assault on literature can help re-frame the reasons that technofascists attack coding through "AI" automation. Efficiency is simply a "surface feature" and excuse.

Coding provides a massive amount of high level cognitive benefits and invisible skills. I guess I've been doing this a while. I taught my fellow students at secondary school, so maybe I've been been teaching programming in one form or another for four decades. One thing I noticed from the beginning is that once people start learning code they grow very rapidly in their clarity and fluency around other subjects.

Coding bestows;

• an ability to break down problems
• a capacity to hold complex systems in mind
• to execute step-wise solutions
• to plan
• to symbolically represent problems and complex structures
• to think contingently, conditionally and use logic
• to trace root causes and debug
• to recurse and iterate

It has myriad social side effects too. Skill in code helps you to understand when someone is bamboozling or lying to you about technology.

It helps to understand and estimate data and computing requirements and therefore costs.

It helps you to appreciate the socio-technical skills essential to modern living such as computer security, compartmentalisation, integrity, privacy, duplicity, transformation, appearance, trust, uniqueness, data hygiene, garbage collection and clearing up, all of which are implicit or explicitly handled by modern programming languages.

A child who has learned to code has better all round life prospects even if they never write a computer program in all their days.

Coding is the logical, mathematical and linguistic counterpart to English Literature.

Coding is also akin to physical exercise. Switching from writing in C++ to writing in LISP feels like moving from a set of squats that exercise the lower body to doing pull-ups that stimulate the upper body. If string processing for input/output is swimming, then doing precision floating-point maths for signal processing is like running. One can literally feel different areas of brain working out.

As a skill, code contains within it a vast range of cognitive agility and competences that are nothing to do with any ostensible goal of writing "apps" - apps that "solve problems" or "create value" within some narrow-minded commercial context.

As a writer, I am better because I also code. It's not that it gives me the ability to talk knowledgeably about technical subjects, but that it structures my whole outlook on words as tools.

"I suppose I code for a lot of reasons, one of the main ones being so I don't end up being a fucking Microsoft CISO"

We were taught code in the 1980s as a means to create an industrial labour force. One side effect not anticipated by the machinery of state was the massive creative digital industry which sprang forth in such forms as the games and computer animation industry. Another less visible but equally powerful effect has been on the latent digital literacy of the masses in shaping world understanding and opinions.

A collapse of modern literacy and its massive disempowerment of people applies as much to code as to English literature. Coding is necessary because it is political, because all language is political. It is required for the health of a technological society regardless of whether humans produce the vast majority of functional code.

It makes no more sense to stop teaching code because automated language models exist than it does to stop teaching martial arts because there are tanks and rifles. Nobody expects kung-fu to work against bullets. The importance of physical fitness, fast reactions, mental agility, spatial awareness, balance and confidence stand in relation to a whole universe of human living completely separate from the narrow world of kinetic combat.

As a coder, to value yourself only insomuch as you're 'useful' to industrial society is to entirely miss the point of being human, as a thinking and feeling being with free-will, political agency and rights. You don't have to listen too carefully to note that the ones telling you you don't have any free will, political agency, feelings, rights… are the ones building the machines and robots and profiting from that ¹.

It's therefore very important that you hold on to all aspects of literacy, including mathematics and the ability to code in diverse formal computing languages. Do not fall for the trickery of so-called "AI" training which bastardises and dumbs-down all formal and critical thinking. "AI" is a project to weaken you.

The fervour with which the Welsh, and French and every other nation preserve their indigenous languages will inevitably become the same struggle we face as computer scientists and programmers.

One of the reasons to support software freedom is that it is a culture within which coding as a language skill is valued and sustained for its own sake.

You wouldn't say you read George Orwell, Douglas Adams or Philip K Dick for "professional development". You'd say "Oh, reading is a 'hobby' of mine". Yet the invisible benefits to you working as a techie are immense. At the age of 18 I was forced to read Godel Escher Bach because our CS instructors thought it would 'toughen-up' our minds. I am still not sure I really understand what that drill did to me.

Likewise, come to see writing code as a "hobby" and pastime that gives you the same literary superpowers that reading Tolkien and Pratchett gives regarding the ability to see political monsters, spot technofascists, and unmask the various imps and goblins in those realms.

For one thing, if you know how and why things work, you're not fooled when others lie to your face - telling you how they want you to think they work. For example, legal over-confidence in the correctness of computers required robust challenging by Alan Bates in the UK Post Office scandal. We need a million more Bates'. Going forward we will require armies of confident, competent independent challengers to an onslaught of injustices coming with deepfake, "AI" and other manipulative technology for deceit and propaganda. Computer science is maturing toward social justice.

Even if the data-industrial complex and technofascists were able to completely overcome software freedom and impose their locked-down, proprietary control apparatus upon all humanity, code as a cultural phenomenon, as language and cognitive skill will remain as ineradicable as thought itself. It is the reservoir from which resistance and revolution will come since the system cannot eradicate it without destroying itself.

Code will always remain a wellspring of resistance, of alternative societal paradigms, and a source of political challenge to the incumbent apparatus. It is the eye-glasses through which we see which Emperors have no clothes.

Code will therefore become to industrial software engineering what English literature is to film making and journalism. Not an "end" but a foundational essence. In the age of code automation, the goal of computer science, and of those who teach programming, will switch from the impoverished goals of creating industrial workers, to the higher calling of cultivating digital literacy for the ends of political empowerment.

That's why it's also important to distinguish between education and training. There is very little education left in British universities now. It's been replaced by training. If you can find someone who can educate you in the ways of code and computer science, jump at that opportunity.