Thoughts on Programming
(Take the following with a large dose of sea-salt. I am not actually a programmer (yet), which should become obvious.)
The little project I was working on earlier this summer is finally up on the App store [iTunes link]. (If you’d like a promo code just ask.)
It’s a very simple app, but developing it was rather involved, at least for a beginner such as myself. Not only are there big piles of APIs to learn and become familiar with, there’s a certain way of thinking you have to get comfortable with as a developer — not just to develop apps with, but to really understand and learn from what you’re doing.
Programming is more of a discipline than “memorizing a programming language” or such. It’s the way of approaching a problem that’s important. You think through every action that you want your app to execute programmatically, which means breaking up even what appear to be the simplest things into even simpler things, and so on, until you are actually representing doing something in the most logical and straightforward terms, namely numbers. (OK maybe not that simple with higher-level languages, but same idea.) This might seem obvious, but trust me, if you’ve never written code or taken a course in logic, it’s very unfamiliar and just plain non-intuitive at first. Our brains use so many shortcuts and heuristics to understand the world that we forget how complicated they are or how many assumptions they’re built upon.
The concept of a pointer is a case in point. In the code you deal with variables:
x = 12
y = 2
x and y are variables that refer to that number. Thus you can say
a = x + y
and a will equal 14. But let’s say I want to deal with something more involved than a number… perhaps a string of letters that reads "Hello!". You can’t really represent "Hello!" as a thing because "Hello!" is a collection of things, namely letters, so you instead have to point to this collection of things. (This is exactly that “breaking things up into their simplest parts” I referred to earlier.) Thus you need a pointer to "Hello!", called p. But p is not equal to "Hello!" in this sense, p merely contains information about where this collection "Hello!" can be found. p is really equal to an address in memory, which is just a number. If you don’t explicitly use p as a pointer, and say something like print p, you might be surprised by the number that pops out when you were expecting a string.
[N.B.: Pointers are notoriously hard to explain to the uninitiated, so if I failed miserably in making any sense, don’t be alarmed or write off programming as utterly silly and confusing. In fact some higher-level programming languages try to do away with pointers, but only in the sense that the language is using shorthand, just as our brains do, so the same problems come up and eventually even if you aren’t “required” to know about pointers you probably should. In any event, if you’re interested, buy a real programming book to learn about them.]
But pointers aren’t just some programming nonsense. We use pointers all the time in language, we just don’t realize it. Every name points to a thing. If I write, “heuristic” is an interesting word, I’m referring to the word “heuristic” (as indicated by quotes). It becomes especially important in politics, because when a word or phrase — say “health care” — becomes politicized, we very often confuse the pointer with the thing being pointed at. Often when one refers to “health care” it is less of a real thing that can be studied and understood and more a phrase that evokes all sorts of emotions and identities and political affiliations and whatnot.
I guess my point (sorry, using that particular sequence of letters a lot here) ultimately is that the logical underpinnings of programming are really interesting and definitely apply to “real life” stuff. The language and APIs or frameworks you are developing in are arbitrary and idiosyncratic, but again it’s because any programming language beyond assembly code is an abstraction of the fundamental logic — a shorthand for doing repetitive and oft-used tasks. So programming isn’t just “learning the language” but really learning a way of thinking which of course also applies to learning English or Spanish or French or Chinese because they all have different kinds of shorthand. If you’ve ever experienced how a native speaker of a different language than your own communicates, how differently they construct sentences and ideas to convey meaning, you’ll understand what I mean.
([Addendum] Of course, you then start to realize how your own language and though-processes might by arbitrary and idiosyncratic, something that you’ve learned and constructed unconsciously over time and which are probably biased towards your cultural/social/individual perception of the world, and you start to wonder how you could ever possibly know anything with such a language and way of thinking, and you get a little depressed. But then you realize you can still use this perfectly uncertain and ambiguous language to order a coffee at Starbucks, and the world is right again.)
