Starting in the middle, maybe with the movie The Matrix (1999), coding became an everyday thought problem. The movie’s visual metaphor for the world as code is the logical end to the trajectory of modernity’s drive to classify and calibrate, reflected in Lord Kelvin’s famous dictum that “to measure a thing is to know something about it.”1 This ever-narrower calibration of the natural world in the last two hundred years—think how human beings moved from autonomous bodies to assemblies of molecular double helix strands of DNA informed by epigenetic forces in their environment—is a chimera of codes turning the material into the immaterial, representation into illusion, engineering into software, and design into natural language processing. There is power in this kind of transformation, but perhaps also some loss. Can we understand coding’s transformative power better by starting at the beginning, at least in the modern era?
