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1. Highly recommended
   I’ve been a programmer, sys admin, IT projecte manager for ages so I was very curious about this book.
   Even if I worked with different languages and softwares (sometimes it matters) I was able to recognize some of the mind processes and experiences.
   It’s thought provoking and entertaining at the same time.
   Highly recommended.
   Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

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2. In the Stack, Down the Rabbit Hole
   Smith provides an omnibus history and personal account of coding from the early logic arguments of George Boole to current cryptocurrency’s block chain communal data-sharing.. He wheels through philosophy, art, music, artificial intelligence [machine learning], neurology…and home appliance repair. He reads voraciously and learns to code. You can learn more than you may want to about the pros and cons of different coding languages. You’ll meet some eccentric figures, delve deep into tech giant cultures. More importantly you’ll learn where tech helps and its limitations, because the universe and its creature’s behaviors cannot be defined by bits and bytes. As one wit opined centuries ago, “You cannot legislate morality” because you cannot write enough rules to cover all contingencies.
   Likewise, you cannot write decision-making schemes for unexperienced scenarios, such as a tragic self-driving car incident hitting a bicyclist with grocery bags on both arms of the bike’s handle. As Daniel Kahnemann, Tversky and Thaler have taught us, humans don’t make rational decisions and thus, our algorithms might be irrational as well. Smith quotes many others including the author of “Weapons of Math Destruction,” that some unintended, ugly consequences occur when our biases and prejudices are not questioned or held in check. We might rely on “seeing is believing” when we actually make rules based on “believing is seeing.” We ignore contrary data that doesn’t fit our models, conceptions and rules of thumb.
   Meanwhile, our brains adapt to the environment we’re immersed in. And so, the author acknowledges that he’s even started to think and behave differently since starting to work on programming projects. So can machines learn, adapt, trust some intuitive feel, for example, that someone is lying in an ever-changing world? Smith explores this in this readable romp through the computing industry.

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3. An entertaining chronicle of thoughts while learning to code and on coding culture.
   As someone who learnt to program at an early age (and has spent a lot of his life exercising those skills), it was interesting to read about the experiences of a beginner so clearly expressed. It is particularly useful perspective when teaching others who may not approach this space with enthusiasm.
   What I appreciated less was the philosophical aspects of the project and the whipsawing between optimism and pessimism. Andrew Smith is searching for the ‘devil’ in the stack. This search appears to be a kind of search for the essence of computer technology, perhaps in a similar vein to Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology. This isn’t a neutral search, as Smith is in search of a ‘devil’, an essence of computer technology which explains negative aspects of the world we inhabit.
   Eventually Smith realises that Binary can’t be the essence as it isn’t really essential. In the end he casts Abstraction in the role of his devil. The problem is that Abstraction is key to so many aspects of human activity. He hand waves this away by saying computing produces so many more new abstractions all the time. While this may be true it still seems to me to be more a matter of limited degree.
   By making Abstraction his devil he reminds me of primitivists.
   “As we immerse ourselves in the world of objectification and abstraction, we see the triumph
   of the symbols for reality over the reality of experience itself.” – Running On Emptiness, John Zerzan
   So this could make you reject all civilisation or simply “touch grass”.
   But I think many of the problems being caused in our world by computer technology are really the impacts of already existing power relationships being amplified.
   There are interesting ideas (and some naive ones) in the book but they aren’t as fully developed as I would’ve liked. It is however entertainingly written.

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4. Starts as a confection and builds to something much more substantial.
   The books starts as a memoir of learning to code in order to understand our world more clearly. It expands to cover the history of computing highlighting events and people that are mostly forgotten. It also covers how the profile of the people working in the industry has changed. The final expansion covers the impact on wider society.
   One of the interesting nuggets in the book is that Andy Hetzfeld (“Software Wizard” at Apple) is now a Pythonista.
   I am not sure that I agree with all the arguments, but the book has given me things to think about and more books for my reading list. This is a lot more than I expected.
   The author has a nice line in computerist humour.
   Some will dislike this book because it questions the status quo.

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5. This is an easy to read personal journey of someone learning Python and simultaneously creating an outline of the history of computing far more useful than most. I found it inspirational at a time when I am struggling to complete a project to develop tractor automation in Python. I read a bit every day and pick up tips and ideas about code improvement, recruiting coders, and identifying traits within myself.
   Thoroughly recommended.

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