From Bits to Words: A Tale of Computing and Communication Languages

Bit and Byte: Computer Languages

In high school, he met a language that forever shaped his career: C++. He had played with computer languages before: telling LOGO turtle to turn right, take three steps, make a 120-degree left turn, take three steps, make a 120-degree left turn and take another three steps to make an equilateral triangle. But back then, he played with the turtle, not “writing” in a language. At least he didn’t think of it like that.

But C++ was different. It was powerful and could communicate precisely. Furthermore, unlike Sanskrit or Hindi, it had very few grammar rules. If you got the rules, you got the rules. When someone asked “why” about a rule? The only answer was that Tim Berners Lee decided to make it that way. He picked up the rules and started talking to the computer.

Why did I have to write cout<< and not, say, print()? Why are strings stored as an array?

Why could you write something like that means nothing, does nothing and costs nothing?

[](){};

It’s a lambda expression that captures nothing, takes no parameters and has no body. It just exists.

Why does it work? Because it’s permitted by some narrowly defined rules.

Talking to computers is straightforward. You say something to the computer, and it either gets it or doesn’t. There is no way a computer would understand things differently than what you said; if it does, you didn’t tell it right. It doesn’t have spatial memory either. A for loop means the same thing in a program that runs an Intel chip as it does in a program that powers Google.

Computers are obedient slaves. Whatever you told them, they did — if they could.² There was no otherwise. If they couldn’t, they would “fail”. They had no brains.

Then he had an evil plan.

via GIPHY

Uncle Ben said, “with great power comes great responsibility”. Uncle Ben was late in telling this to Spiderman, and our hero hadn’t watched Spiderman anyway. Being young makes you naive. He used his weekly quota of 10-minute internet time to conjure a plan. He would write a code that would specifically delete some executables from Windows c://, breaking the computer irrevocably and requiring a clean reinstall of Windows.

C++ is a powerful language and can communicate precisely. (Looking at you, English!) He started with a program to delete the text file he created. Done. He put the text file in “Program Files” and asked the program to delete it. Done. He made the code delete some files in the “Win32” folder inside the “Program Files”. Once he was confident the code worked, he needed a goat to be slaughtered.

It can’t be his own computer, obviously. His school’s computer lab had about 50 computers, and the class size was 36. That left about 14 computers to be experimented with. All plans ready, he copied the .exe file to a pen drive, would put it in a computer that no one used and saw if it worked.

It damn well worked.

The only problem was that no one cared. The computer was reimaged in less than a week, and Bill’s Windows was back! He thought he’ll have to 1-up his game. Taking inspiration from hacking scenes in a Hollywood movie, he wrote a code that would show exactly this on the screen. (All he remembers about the movie was that the hero had to crack the code to do something important. That required a password, and the hint was what you sit on but never carry with you. The password was “Chair”.)

> ?
_

The cursor would keep blinking till you hit 11 keys. Any 11 keys. Unless you press Alt + Ctrl + Del which would bring up the task manager and you’d have to kill the program. He would’ve eliminated the possibility of killing it via the task manager, but the next time he’d get his 10-minute internet time was a month later. And he hadn’t discovered Stackoverflow yet. (Was it even a thing?)

With the backdoor in mind, he combined both tools which made the executable .exe file which will show the black screen waiting for 11 keystrokes and then delete a critical file which would crash the computer. It wasn’t difficult to find which file to delete. Windows has been pretty vulnerable.³

To test this, he needed time and courage. He approached his other cool friend. Someone who knows computers as much as he did. Much to his surprise, that friend was happy to sacrifice his own computer for the experiment! They sat together in front of his computer, double-clicked the .exe file and nervously hit 11 keys after which the program closed.

Nothing happened. They thought nothing had happened. At least, initially. The friend passed unpolitical remarks to our hero. But the hero was confident.

A computer is an obedient slave with no brain. How could it not do what he asked?

But their confusion was quickly gone. The Windows soon gave an error, and it couldn’t boot up. Mission successfully failed!

Back to Human Languages

All was good in Newfoundland till he started college. Now, he had to learn German. Oh, how much he dreaded human languages. Wasn’t English enough?

Not according to the university. They believed “modern leaders need to know international languages, owing to growing interest in internationalisation”. Much to his dismay, German grammar was very similar to Sanskrit grammar. Hate multiplied. He memorised some words that’d be enough for him to pass the exam. He passed by thin margins.

He also realised his English, which he took pride in, wasn’t as good as he thought. Like a frog in the pond, he had little idea of what was happening across the country and the world. Studying with the “bests” (somewhat presumptuous as they declared it themselves, like Britain) at the university showed him a mirror. All his debating and declamation experiences were virtually useless when it came to impromptu speeches. As it turns out, he was just an intelligent parrot.

Realizing his limitations, he approached for help. A professor advised him to start writing and reading extensively. But more than that, start discussing it with others. He liked debating, but now he had to turn it into fruitful discussions. Slowly, he improved.

Around the same time, he encountered another language, masquerading as a statistical tool: R. The name sounded funny — and it was a pun intended by the authors of the language as the first letters of their names. But the language was sans all the void main() crap of C++.

Like here’s a code to print the first ten Fibonacci numbers in C++. (He remembers writing codes differently in Turbo C++. But today, he doesn’t use C++ at all, and that flavour of C++ is not compatible with modern operating systems like MacOS.)

#include <iostream>

using namespace std;

// function to print first "n" Fibonacci numbers
void fibonacci(int n)
{
    int f1 = 0, f2 = 1, i;
 
    if (n < 1)
        return;
    cout << f1 << " ";
    for (i = 1; i < n; i++) {
        cout << f2 << " ";
        int next = f1 + f2;
        f1 = f2;
        f2 = next;
    }
}
 
// Main function
int main()
{
    fibonacci(10);
    return 0;
}


0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 

...Program finished with exit code 0
Press ENTER to exit console.

# function to print first "n" Fibonacci numbers
fibonacci = function(n)
{
   fibs = numeric(n)
   fibs[1] = 0
   fibs[2] = 1
   
   for (i in 3:n)
      fibs[i] = fibs[i-1] + fibs[i-2]
   
   return(fibs)
}

# Function call
> fibonacci(10)
[1]  0  1  1  2  3  5  8 13 21 34

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one -- and preferably only one -- obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!