Название: Coderspeak: The language of computer programmersАвтор: Guilherme Orlandini Heurich
Издательство: UCL Press
Год: 2024
Страниц: 212
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf, epub (true), mobi
Размер: 10.1 MB
Software applications have taken over our lives. We use and are used by software many times a day. Nevertheless, we know very little about the invisibly ubiquitous workers who write software. Who are they and how do they perceive their own practice? How does that shape the ways in which they collaborate to build the myriad of apps that we use every day?
Coderspeak provides a critical approach to the digital transformation of our world through an engaging and thoughtful analysis of the people who write software. It is a focused and in-depth look at one programming language and its community – Ruby - based on ethnographic research at a London company and conversations with members of the wider Ruby community in Europe, the Americas and Japan. This book shows that the place people write code, the language they write it in and the stories shared by that community are crucial in questioning and unpacking what it means to be a 'coder'. Understanding this social group is essential if we are to grasp a future (and a present) in which computer programming increasingly dominates our lives.
Computer programs can implement this process of sorting cards (or anything else) in many ways. You did it by going over each element one by one and comparing them to the ones you had already seen. This process of going over each element and doing something with it, this action of picking a card and applying some thinking to it, is at the heart of one of the quintessential structures of the Ruby programming language: the ‘block’.
One of the philosophies of the Ruby language (and of its community) is that there are many ways of doing something. Everything is open for modification in Ruby. Elements that most language designers wouldn’t allow programmers to change, Ruby allows. With Ruby you are free to add what you want – although, as we’ll see, not everyone agrees that’s a good idea. Being able to extend the language is key to Ruby’s philosophy, however, and blocks are a key structure for the programmer to exercise this freedom to extend the language. You can create your own way of operating repeatedly over data, just like you did with your card_deck. You can design blocks to iterate over things in any way you want. Blocks were even called iterators at some point, but they were soon freed from playing this relatively limited role. A block can do anything: that’s why it is the one mandatory structure in the Ruby language. If you think in blocks, then Ruby is for you. It fits your brain and it makes you happy.
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