Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty

I didn’t feel comfortable

hacking up the code of a Real Programmer.12

Despite the allusion above to “the *macho* side of programming,” the non-geek may not fully grasp that within the culture of programmers, Mel es muy macho. The Real Programmer squints his eyes, does his work, and rides into the horizon to the whistling notes of E

That second computer was the Apple II, the machine that defined personal computing, that is on every list of the greatest computers ever made. Woz designed all the hardware and all the circuit boards and all the software that went into the Apple II, while the other Steve spewed marketing talk at potential investors and customers on the phone. Every piece and bit and byte of that computer was done by Woz, and not one bug has ever been found, “not one bug in the hardware, not one bug in the software.”15 The circuit design of the Apple II is widely considered to be astonishingly beautiful, as close to perfection as one can get in engineering.

Woz did both hardware and software. Woz created a programming language in machine code. Woz is hardcore.

Working in machine code is very hard, so assembly code was created by adding some mnemonics to machine code. Working in assembly code is still hard; doing anything complex — like making games — in it is insanely hard. On programmers.stackexchange.com, a user going by the nom de guerre “DFectuoso” asked, “Are there any famous one-man-army programmers?”16 During the ensuing discussion about lone coders, one of the participants mentioned Chris Sawyer, who wrote the hugely successful 1999 game, RollerCoaster Tycoon: “He had a little help with music and graphics, but otherwise RollerCoaster Tycoon was all him. Amazing, especially given the physics engine. Last but not least, the entire game was written in assembly language.” And another commenter responded, “He wrote that in assembly?! Jesus Christ. I think I need to go boil my brain now.”

Sawyer’s achievements are indeed brain-boilingly immense, but why and how does a lone Scottish geek toiling obsessively over his virtual roller coasters become a “one-man-army”? Why do the Einsteins of programming affect — in their online personas and sometimes in person — a blustery True Grit swagger? Therein lies one of the tales that Nathan Ensmenger tells in his illuminating social history of computing, The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise. Ensmenger does for computing in North America what historians of science have done for other disciplines: locate the development of knowledge and technology firmly within a messy matrix of human agency and politics; there is no orderly teleological progress from triumph to triumph, only competing interests that struggle over authority, access, and power. The computer boys of Ensmenger’s title are the early software-builders, the pioneers; the irony, as Ensmenger shows, is that many of them were women. In fact, the earliest programmers were all women: the “ENIAC girls” were women recruited by the (male) engineers and managers of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. The creators of the ENIAC had a clear division of labor in mind: the male scientist or “pla

This division of tasks of course echoed the hierarchies already present; men did the thinking and inventing, women were clerks. “The telephone switchboard-like appearance of the ENIAC programming cable-and-plug panels,” Ensmenger writes, “reinforced the notion that programmers were mere machine operators, that programming was more handicraft than science, more feminine than masculine, more mechanical than intellectual.”18 The pla

But to my astonishment, [Dr von Neuma

So the next week when I came up with some alterations in the code, I approached him again with the same question. He gave me the same answer. Well I really got red in the face. I was so excited and I really wanted to tell him off. And I said, “But Dr. von Neuma

Once von Neuma

In 1967, Cosmopolitan magazine carried an article titled “The Computer Girls” that emphasized that programming was a field in which there was “no sex discrimination in hiring”—“every company that makes or uses computers hires women to program them … If a girl is qualified, she’s got the job.” Admiral Grace Hopper, programming pioneer, assured the Cosmo readers that programming was “just like pla