‘The Magic of Code' Review: The Book of Binary
There's an old story from the Jewish tradition about a group of rabbis debating who owns a bird found near a property line. The rule seems simple—birds on one side belong to the property owner, birds on the other don't—until Rabbi Jeremiah raises a hand and asks: What if the bird has one foot on each side of the line? His fellow rabbis respond by showing him the door.
When you're writing software, Samuel Arbesman explains in 'The Magic of Code,' you should 'be like Rabbi Jeremiah, relentlessly thinking about edge cases, weird exceptions to the rule, and rare situations.' Mr. Arbesman speaks from experience. As a child, he learned Basic (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) on an early personal computer with his father—a formative experience that sparked a passion for programming and an enduring fascination with technology. Trained as a computational biologist, he now serves as a scientist in residence at a venture-capital firm, where he seems to have the enviable job of thinking and writing about anything he finds interesting, including computers.
Inspired by the early playful hackers—'swaggering cowboys of the command line' like Steve Wozniak, who 'wrote the implementation for Apple's Basic language on paper entirely by hand'—Mr. Arbesman worries that computing has become too familiar, its sense of 'sublime and delight' buried beneath tools devoid of whimsy. In response, he offers a 'love letter to the computer,' meant to guide readers through a world of beauty, mysticism and possibility.
For Mr. Arbesman, computation is a 'domain of sorcery and power' in which words are given the power to act in the real world. Like spells, programming tools are often collected in grimoires. An early example is Hakmem, a 1972 'hacks memo' comprising tricks and techniques from the MIT AI Lab. Today the website Stack Overflow, Mr. Arbesman writes, serves as a 'repository of programming, a place to share spells and bits of lore.' He notes that, like magic, computing often demands a sacrifice. In the case of artificial intelligence, 'you must place a large corpus of humanity's creations upon its altar.'
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