Coderspeak: The language of computer programmers

Coderspeak delves into the hidden world of software development, offering a combined anthropological and technical approach that explores the coder community's impact on our digital landscape.

Software applications have taken over our lives. We use and are used by software many times a day. Nevertheless, we know very little about the invisibly ubiquitous workers who write software. Who are they and how do they perceive their practice? How does that shape how they collaborate to build the myriad of apps that we use every day? And how does that impact the users of apps?

Coderspeak provides a critical approach to the digital transformation of our world through an engaging and thoughtful analysis of the people who write software applications. It is a focused and in-depth look at one programming language and its community, Ruby, based on ethnographic research at a London company and conversations with members of the wider Ruby community in Europe, the Americas, and Japan.

This book shows that the place where people write code, the language they write it in, and the stories shared by that community are crucial in questioning and unpacking what it means to be a coder. Understanding this social group is essential if we are to grasp a future (and a present) in which computer programming increasingly dominates our lives.
 

Guilherme Orlandini Heurich is an honorary research fellow in the Department of Anthropology at UCL, UK.