If you are a typical person interacting with most technology, your only concern is that it "just works," as Steve Jobs liked to say of Apple products. But that simple metric wasn't enough to satisfy journalist Andrew Smith. The product of his curiosity is Devil in the Stack, a fascinating journey into the world of computer code, its history, the people who create it, some of its current controversies, and its implications for the future of society.
Smith's four-year odyssey in what he calls the microcosmos is so engrossing, in part, because he's not content to be a bystander in the coding process. Instead, with refreshing self-deprecation, he describes his halting steps toward acquiring proficiency in the art, a task that finds him settling on the language known as Python, whose creator, Dutch programmer Guido van Rossum, is one of a roster of key programming figures he interviews. Smith illuminates the beauty of open-source software's collaborative aspects and the frequent challenges to realizing them. He calls out the "staggering homogeneity within the profession," reflected in the fact that a mere 7% of coders are women, while less than 3% are Black, and describes the real-world consequences of this lack of diversity.
In taking readers on an intellectually stimulating guided tour of the sometimes exotic world of programming, Smith (Totally Wired) hopes to "open a broad discussion of what we want code to do for us and what we don't." Anyone who's curious about the why and how of what makes computers do what they do will find Devil in the Stack a fertile introduction. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer