In my fifties, I learnt the language of computer programming. This is what I found out.

One day in 2017, I had a realisation that appears apparent now, however had the strength to surprise lower back then: nearly the entirety I did turned into being mediated with the aid of using pc code. And because the trickle of code into my international has become a flood, that international is regarded to be getting no longer higher but worse in approximate proportion. I started to marvel at why.

Two opportunities sprang straight away to mind. One turned into the folks who wrote the code – coders – depicted in popular culture as an extended family of vaguely comic, Tolkien-worshipping misfits. Another turned into the uber-capitalist machine inside which many worked, exemplified by the aid of the profoundly bizarre Silicon Valley. Was one or each the use of code to recast the human surroundings as something more amenable to them?

There turned into additionally a 3rd possibility, one I slightly dared ponder since the possibility of it was so appalling. What if there has been something approximately the way we compute that was at odds with the way people are? I`d in no way heard all and sundry recommend this kind of possibility, however, in theory, at least, it turned into there. Slowly, it have become clean that the simplest manner to discover could be to climb within the gadget with the aid of using studying to code myself.

Each language has its very own wonderful ethos and followers, parlayed into subcultures as passionate and entire as teen subcultures. As an author in my 50s and not having a technical background, I knew almost nothing approximately how code worked. But I had come across – and been intrigued by the use of – coders while writing a magazine article approximately Bitcoin some years earlier.

The cryptocurrency`s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, had left few clues as to his identification earlier than vanishing. Yet he had left 100,000 traces of code, which I discovered his friends analyzing like literature. I found out that there have been heaps of programming languages used to speak with the machines, which includes some dozen huge ones whose names tended to signify both roses or unconscionably robust cleansing products (Perl, Ruby, Cobol, Go), and that every had its very own wonderful ethos and cultish band of followers, parlayed into subcultures as passionate and entire because the teens subcultures – punks, mods, goths, skinheads – I grew up with.

It seemed there was even competition and mild hostility among these tribes. These tribes are friction coders that are as harmful as "religious wars" because no one changes their opinion. Suddenly, the kingdom of Corder looked rich and attractive. After that, I spoke to theoretical physicists who investigated "high frequency trading" on the stock exchange.

Algorithms working outside of human control fought each other against the state of the market. I was scared, but I was fascinated when he described this Code Cosmos as "the first generation ecosystem." His team's research was published in essentially non-physical or computer journals.

The gap from curiosity was everything I had on my side when I learned in the domain that was more quirky and often interesting than I had imagined. As with all code-NAIF, my first task was to choose a language. But what is based on? I finally found an extraordinary website called FreeCodeCamp.

There, we learned that there were three classic languages ​​behind most websites, and many learners started from that. The HTML for HyperText Markup language was created by Tim Berners-Lee at the dawn of the World Wide Web and is used to define the structure of a website, while CSS (Cascading Style) allows for the styling of HTML elements. JavaScript can be used optionally to promote these elements.

I enjoyed the first two, got over the first code crisis, and experienced the joy of turning something into a machine that I intended. I just moved around until someone pointed out that I liked HTML and CSS because they were "algorithms". In other words, it's not a program.

Then some curses occurred. But in my mind I knew that my choices were not a coincidence. The algorithm is slippery and difficult to control in an inherently binary, strange and irregular environment, with misleading commas that can cause plane explosions to be hit or satellites. Some of me wanted to avoid them. Next, I saw JavaScript, the pillar of Web Triad's powerful algorithms, and hated it.

Algorithms are fundamentally straightforward and primarily comprise "if" statements (if "x" occurs, do "y"; else, do "z") and "while loops" (continue doing "y" as long as "x" is applicable, cease doing so when "x" is no longer applicable). Algorithms focus on and reinforce what they are provided by nature. In theory, the world gets better if those things are good, and worse if they are bad. It's not that easy.

But it wasn't just my unease with algorithms that made me feel horrified by JavaScript. The main issue was aesthetic, which seemed odd for what I had always considered to be a hyper-rational environment. Emotional

I felt terrible just looking at JavaScript, with its unsightly flights of brackets and braces and needless-looking reams of semicolons. Additionally, there appeared to be twenty-five distinct methods for completing each task, and these methods were always evolving, transforming the language into a wild west of code.

I kept thinking, "I can't do this; coding's not for me – I don't have the right kind of mind (and never liked Star Wars)," as I spent more time with it. Compared to my first day back at Hogwarts, my first day at the Python Coders' Conference was less like the formal assembly I had imagined.

I was at my lowest point until a buddy of a friend who is a professional programmer suggested that I try learning another language before giving up. He introduced me to Nicholas Tollervey, a well-known figure in the Python programming world.

I looked at Python before phoning Tollervey, and I immediately felt more comfortable with it. Its syntax caught my attention right away since it was sparse and simple, using indentation to convey commands to the machine instead of unsightly symbols. The language was created by Guido van Rossum, a naturally cooperative Dutchman who valued community, communication, and empathy, or how his language would function in the wild, above all else.

In an attempt to give his language a whimsical, human touch, he christened it Python after Monty Python. I was unsure of what I was getting into when Tollervey proposed that I go to Cleveland, Ohio, to attend the 4,000-person PyCon conference.

It was more like the first day back at Hogwarts than the formal assembly I had imagined. I met Tollervey, who played the tuba before switching to coding after graduating from the Royal College of Music. I would frequently hear stories like this at PyCon. I discovered that Python took more than 20 years to gain popularity after making its debut in the early 1990s:

When Van Rossum called a meet-up at a major computing conference at the beginning of this century, he found that very few aficionados showed up. However, his priorities for the language became apparent as applications became more complicated and larger. When I questioned Naomi, the chair of the Python Software Foundation at the time,