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Editor's note: Marc Andreessen's statement a decade ago that "software eats the world" is not only quite true, but it seems to be more than that: software is reshaping the world. The human world can no longer function without software. Which of the vast amounts of software code plays a key role for us? Slate invited people to select code that changed everything, and 36 code snippets were selected here. If you have a better option, you may wish to leave your comments in the comments section. The original author is Future Tense, titled: The Lines of Code That Changed Everything. In view of the length of the article, we will publish it in three parts, the first of which is the first.
Back in 2009, Facebook introduced a world-changing code snippet — a "like" button. "Like" was the brainchild of several programmers and designers, including Leah Pearlman and Justin Rosenstein. They speculate that Facebook users are often too busy to comment on friends' posts, so they thought that if there was a simple button to press, perhaps the interaction would explode: it could unleash a lot of exciting affirmations. As Pearlman later put it, "Friends can verify each other through this much more frequent and easy interaction." ”
The idea worked, maybe a little too well. By making "like" a zero-resistance gesture, by 2012, the number of likes had exceeded 1 trillion times, and indeed released a lot of verification. But its side effects are also troubling. After we post a photo, we sit there anxiously refreshing the page, waiting for the number of likes to increase. We wonder why others get more likes than their own. So we started to amplify our daily online behavior: wanting to be more interesting, mean, charming, and extreme.
Code shapes our lives. As venture capitalist Marc Andreessen writes, "Software eats away at the world," though it might be more accurate to say that software is digesting the world at the moment.
Culturally speaking, code is a relatively lower-level existence. We can feel its mysterious effect on our everyday reality, but it is rare to see it and is a bit unpredictable for non-beginners. (People in Silicon Valley like this which helps them to self-mythologize as wizards.) We've made top ten lists for movies, games, and television, making the works that shape our souls famous. But even though code reflects the times as much as these types of work, we haven't sat down to compile the world's most important code listings.
So Slate Magazine decided to do it itself. To figure out what software tilts the world, magazine editors poll computer scientists, software developers, historians, policymakers, and journalists. These people need to make the following choices: Which code snippets have a big impact? What code has changed our lives? About 75 respondents came up with a variety of ideas, of which Slate chose 36. Given the amount of influential code that has been written, the list here is not complete and cannot be complete. (One of my favorites is not a candidate: quick-sort algorithm!) Or Ada Lovelace's Bernoulli algorithm might also count as one. Like all lists, it's meant to inspire and help us rethink how code affects our lives and how decisions made by programmers affect the future.
There's some code you've probably heard of, like HTML or something. Some of the code is powerful (such as the Monte Carlo simulation used to model probabilities), but the average person has no idea what it is. Others contain fatal errors, such as flaws in the Boeing 737 Max. There's also something creepy, like pixel tracking that lets marketers know if you've turned on an email.
One trend is clear: the most important code tends to shape new behavior by eliminating resistance. When software makes it easier to do something, we do more of it. Code written in 1988 was the first to establish the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) system, which allowed early Netizens to have text chats with each other in real time. Now, live text chat is everywhere, from the overwhelming Slack workplace chat blowing water, to Twitch live fishing and anti-fishing battles.
It's not always clear when some code has epoch-making significance. At first it was just a weird attempt, an experimental balloon. 《Spacewar ！ was the first video game to get viral. But in 1961, a $120,000 rack-mounted computer game worth $120,000 (equivalent to $1 million in 2019) was seen as a rather boring way to use it. But it created a lot of concepts that helped computers get mainstream: representing data with icons and letting users manipulate those icons with a handheld controller.
The impact of the code can surprise everyone, including the person who wrote it. —Clive Thompson, author of Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World
Year: 1725
The first piece of code
Binary programming existed long before computers were born. It is believed that Basile Bouchon was the first to punch holes in pieces of paper and use them to control the machine: in 1725 he invented a loom that could weave patterns according to the instructions of the punched cards that were sent in. The punch is "1" and the hole without punch is "0". Although things have changed a lot since then, the basic building blocks of the code have not changed. — Elena Botella ，Slate
Year: 1948
It opened up both the use of computer code and the use of the nuclear destruction computer models that shaped the Cold War arms race
ENIAC (Electronic Digital Integration Computer) was the first programmable electronic computer. The machine was built in 1945, and each new problem was solved by rewiring many components. When a task (such as addition) is completed, a pulse is used to trigger the next task. But a few years later, Clara M. Dan von Neumann and Nicholas Metropolis, a scientist at Los Alamos, rewired ENIAC, allowing the machine to run out of the first modern code ever executed on any computer: executing hundreds of digital instructions from addressable read-only memory (ENIAC's function table switch). They simulated the explosions of several atomic bomb designs being evaluated at los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, using Monte Carlo technology to simulate a complex system, presenting the probability distribution of possible outcomes almost step by step. von Neumann and Metropolis) sent more than 20,000 cards to nuclear scientists in Los Alamos to track how the simulated neutrons changed after the warhead detonated. Knowing that today, future generations of this code still play a role in Los Alamos. —Thomas Haigh, co-author of ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer
Year: 1952
Makes it possible for computers to process text
IF END OF DATA GO TO OPERATION 14 .
From Wikipedia
When Grace Hopper decided to simplify the entire process by basing it on human language, she was programming an early computer. Hopper joined the U.S. Naval Reserve during World War II, and she knew that, like her superiors in the unit, everyone was struggling to understand binary code. And if the programming language were based on English, the work wouldn't be so easy to go wrong and would be more approachable for those who don't have a PhD in mathematics.
Some scoffed at the idea, but in the early 1950s she devised a compiler, a set of instructions that could transform easier-to-understand code into lower-level code processed by machines. With this tool, she and her lab developed FLOW-MATIC, the first programming language to incorporate English into the process. ——Molly Olmstead，Slate
Year: 1961
The first video game released
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Steve Russell, collected from Bitsavers.org
In late 1961, a group of young MIT employees, students, and colleagues, many of whom were members of the Tech Model Railroad Club, were granted late-night access to the DEC PDP-1 computer that had recently been donated. The PDP-1, which is a cutting-edge technology in non-military computing, sells for $120,000 (more than $1 million by today's calculations), has 18 characters in length, and stores the program on paper tape. The programmers spent five months developing a game in which two players control a spaceship (needle and wedge) in a one-on-one space battle, while also avoiding the gravitational pull of the star in the center of the screen.
Soon, interstellar flight! It spread in the early "hacking" community. Dec then preloaded it into each PDP-1 and preloaded it into core memory for demonstration at installation. The app had a major impact on the still small coding community of the 1960s and inspired subsequent generations of video game creators. It is now also finding its presence in the simulator and is still being demonstrated regularly on the last operational PDP-1 in the Computer History Museum. In 2018, steve Russell, the game's lead developer, said at the Smithsonian Institution: "It's over 50 years old. There are no unresolved user complaints. There are no crash reports. And support is still available. —Arthur Daemmrich, director, Le Mason Center for Invention and Innovation Research
Year: 1965
Please, this is email.
WHENEVER A(1). E.FENCE.OR. A(2). E.FENCE.OR. A(3). E.FENCE PRFULL. (