A few years ago, as journalist Clive Thompson started working on his new book about the world of coding and coders, he went to see the musical Hamilton. His take-away? The founding fathers were basically modern-day programmers.
“Hamilton, Madison and Jefferson entered “‘The Room Where it Happens' and Hamilton [came] out having written 20 lines of code that basically said, ‘Washington is going to be this center of power, and there's going to be the national bank,'” Thompson told me. “They pushed their software update, and completely changed the country.'”
Throughout history, Thompson said, “a professional class has had an enormous amount of power. What the people in that class could do was suddenly incredibly important and incredibly political and pivotal. Society needed their skills badly, and just a few people could make decisions that had an enormous impact.”
In 1789, those people were the lawyers or legalists; in 2019, it's the coders. “They set down the rules to determine how we're going to do things. If they make it easier to do something, we do tons more of it,” he explained. “If we want to understand how today's world works, we ought to understand something about coders.”
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