What Is Code?

Paul Ford's June 2015 Bloomberg Businessweek cover story — a 38,000-word interactive feature that consumed an entire issue and became the canonical popular introduction to software for non-programmers. Ford structures the piece around a fictional middle-aged executive who has just been told by a vendor he's been "replatformed," and uses that anxiety to walk through what code actually is, how programmers think, why there are so many languages, what the web really does, and why understanding software is now an essential literacy. Note: Bloomberg disallows automated fetching; widely-documented essay.