Communications of the ACM
Book Identifies 26 Lines of Code That Changed the World
The book's title is drawn from a famous comment by Dennis Ritchie on context switching code.
Credit: Amazon
"I can't take any credit for the title," Torie Bosch says of her new book, "but I thought it was perfect. . . . It's got this cheekiness to it."
Bosch is the editor of "You Are Not Expected to Understand This": How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World (Princeton University Press, 2022). In a preface, Bosch describes the book's 29 different authors as "technologists, historians, journalists, academics, and sometimes the coders themselves," explaining "how code works — or how, sometimes, it doesn't work — owing in no small way to the people behind it."
With tantalizing chapter titles like "Wear This Code, Go to Jail" and "The Code That Launched a Million Cat Videos," each chapter offers a lively appreciation for programmers, gathering up stories about not just their famous lives but their sometimes infamous works.
From The New Stack
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