This content originally appeared on Level Up Coding - Medium and was authored by Michał Burgunder
In trying to get a full understanding of how computers work, unless all you want is the explicit physics thereof, textbooks do just fine. If you are looking to understand all the information about computers that enter our brains however, then you will very quickly hit a dead end with these texts. Computer “science” is indeed irrevocably clear, informative and conceptually trailblazing, but human beings learn any time we encounter an unexpected experience. Such “bell curve tail-ends”/novelty, from time immemorial to the present day, is still best presented in story form, and not in facts.
Extracting information out of textbooks is a logical process, which makes it more difficult to learn for multiple reasons, one being that it is repetitive (routine work), and the other that it requires higher order thinking (mental effort). Because any routine work is done more and more easily with technology, it increasingly makes us ask why we need to learn anything at all: Most on-the-job mistakes are made by un- or undertrained people across industries instead of computers, so just let them do it. The answer, among software engineers at least, is that mechanical processes only get you so far. The real challenge is to make the inaccessibly complex, such as millions of lines of source code, accessible for humans for further scrutiny in the interest of business/regulatory/trust concerns. When written carefully, stories capture such complexity that computers, even today, cannot express confidently. There are plenty more reasons why we cannot hand things over to a non-human agents such as that they don’t understand the moral principles of individuals, leading us to make opaque decisions, changing lives for the worse.
Because of stories’ reputation as being infantile or passive, stories about computers tend to be forgotten, trivialized, or more commonly today, ignored. However, they can showcase the human element in computing which is what primarily encourages us to think in new ways about current problems. It is a shame then that these writings are not as well respected as papers about computers. In response, I’ve collected a few pieces of writing which are inundated with the human side of computing with easily graspable concepts, many of which have less to do with computing, and more to do with the humans that accommodate the process.
Why this is, is for you to discover. Each of the 10 articles below has stuck with us in one way or another over the past many years since their publications, and continues to influence our thinking abount informatics, computers, and the nature of being human. I am restraining myself from calling these texts “must-read” or “essential”. Perhaps then, I would like to call them “suggested readings for the layperson”. Some of them are more technical than others, but if carefully read, it should be clear that computers are far more complex than any computer scientist might have you believe.
1. On the Cruelty of Teaching Computer Science — Edgar Dijkstra
We begin with Edgar Dijkstra’s seminal short piece on teaching computer science. Written back in 1988, it is as relevant then, as it is now, if not more: Computer science is hard. Anyone who disagrees, hsa clearly been pampered with the stupefying technologies of today that defy any simple explanation. The claim is that anyone who doesn’t go through the process of true “education” in mathematics will unfortunately find that when crises unfold, their many years of half-attentive source code welding will fail in ways that they won’t be able to comprehend. Math still matters.
2. The 500 Mile Email Server— Trey Harris
One of the examples of unmanageable complexity is the email server that cannot send emails further than 500 miles. Computer networking doesn’t have any notion of real world distance, which is why it’s so bizarre that it somehow does indeed follow geographical rules. Harris shows us here, that it’s good-old fashion thinking that is resolving more impasses than we might imagine, and that debugging such issues, sometimes requires a deeply varied education in more things than just one subject.
3. 25 million lines of C — oraguy
While most codebases are modular (they operate independently), some codebases are not. Oracle’s database has been in development since 1979, whose source code is now nearing 25 millions lines of C code, as of 2018. With such a scale, even the most seasoned of engineers are tested to their limits, let alone any code generating agent, such that making a single mistake can have it all come crashing down. What is holding it all together, is sticking to engineering principles, and never letting go of the few things we have at our disposal to rein in such a beast.
4. The Most Sophisticated Software Ever Written — John Bryd
Any single software developer would faint at the sight of this maniacal piece of code. The description of the previous software shocks in size, but the description of this one shocks in finesse, and is assisted by clear, and engaging writing. Although it certainly isn’t a large program, this software has undoubtedly been created with the help of higher powers. At the end of the day, it is of course a developer (or a small team thereof) that wrote the lines of code making up the software. But imagining the thought that went into its design, the research that needed to be performed and the scale of its worldwide impact, is unabashedly mind-blowing.
5. On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem — Section 9a — Alan Turing
This is the paper that brought about the theoretical model of any computing machine. Scrolling through it, one might note that it is highly technical, and very long. Nestled in this paper however, we have section 9a, written in layman’s terms, to describe the computer’s most fundamental aspects. It is not the CPU, or the interface, or even computing per se that makes “a computing device”, but rather it is something more fundamental that, once understood, cannot be unseen. The section is straightforward, but it lays the basic groundwork for all computing to come after it, including quantum and DNA computing, and even now, presents the first step towards any future computing technologies.
6. Reflections on Trusting Trust — Ken Thompson
This transcribed short lecture showcases why we might all be cooked. It is easy for us to trust software made by well-known firms, but in some instances, we need to trust everyone involved in the creation of a software along its entire supply-chain in order to trust that it may not do anything unexpected. Bootstrapping compilers is common practice for many different programming languages to ensure continuous development. Unfortunately, it turns out to be a politically very risky endeavor if scrutiny of its source code isn’t carefully and imperishably documented. If distrust does not arise at the present, it most certainly will if the version control system documenting its creation is lost.
7. Buridan’s Principle — Leslie Lamport
Humorously poignant is Leslie Lamport’s paper on a very subtle effect in computers that cannot be eliminated, regardless of the technology one chooses to use. While most technologists deal with the logic of the written code or the inconsistencies and mistakes that can be found in hard- or software, Lamport shows that we need to think even deeper about computers: We need to think of them as decision makers. It’s papers like these that should convince us that, indeed, mathematics remains the Queen of scientific disciplines, and that it cannot be replaced, no matter how much we wish to do away with it. Not only this, but failure to learn its lessons can, for the reasons he points out, lead to labyrinthine madness.
8. As We May Think — Vannavar Bush
It may come as no surprise that the technologies we have today are mentioned by this article. But we must remember that his article was written before any of them had been invented in the first place. Writing in the aftermath of WWII, Bush attempted to make a future prediction of computing used for the betterment of humanity instead of war and inspired many to pursue the dream of ubiquitous information processing. It is specifically because of this article, that many future technologists (now, past technologists) have pursued the discipline and marks the rare piece of writing that changed the public face of research.
9. Is Google Making us Stupid? — Nicholas Carr
The beginning of the full article (available here) suggests why computing really isn’t a morally neutral endeavor, and follow-up articles of a similar nature confirm this trend. Reading, despite how little each of us may be doing, is still the medium that keeps us from making past mistakes, and bringing about nightmares from the past. But the thing that protected humanity from such things, and its ability to draw people together into purposeful organizations is becoming psychologically inaccessible to humans, in favor of something sinister: That we cannot think clearly at all anymore.
10. A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages — James Iry
As a way to alleviate the seriousness of the past stories, the last article is a relief. History nerds tend to enjoy the fun little things that are recorded throughout history, such as the war over a bucket, and the scribe that recorded his Lord falling off his horse. Here, we have plenty of references to such occurrences, whose descriptive idiosyncrasy makes for a wonderfully entertaining read. Many people who have lived through the creation of the information age will recall many of these instances, while the rest of us will have to look things up, and learn a fun fact here and there. While not entirely informative per say, it gives a casual reader an idea of how the foundations of all programming languages came about.
These 10 writings should be enough (for now) to show that, indeed, computing is ultimately a human process, and not one that can be compartmentalized into neat boxes, as LLMs are prone to do. We need to continue to see through the dirt into seeing how computers change us, day-in, day out, minute after minute. If we fail to think about computers as channels for reductive thinking, our humanity begins to be chipped away. Remember: Our computer’s end goal is not to be the vehicle for change that supports one’s own ideals. Instead, the computer’s end goal is to execute commands by those in power, against those without power for the sake of…. profit? More power?
We might never know.
10 Articles from the Computer World that Everyone Should Read was originally published in Level Up Coding on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
This content originally appeared on Level Up Coding - Medium and was authored by Michał Burgunder
Michał Burgunder | Sciencx (2025-01-17T18:28:59+00:00) 10 Articles from the Computer World that Everyone Should Read. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/01/17/10-articles-from-the-computer-world-that-everyone-should-read/
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