Having wrapped up the first arc of this “World of Code” arc of the podcast with an examination of the ways in which some of the attributes of computer code have had an impact on two very human activities that are very near and dear to my heart: telling stories and playing games; we now begin a new arc in which we examine some of the impacts that the inherent complexity of computer code has on our world, beginning with the complexity of actually creating code by programming a simplified virtual version of our code-enhanced wireless light-switch.
This is the first half of a two-part episode: in this first half, we’ll implement a BASIC version of the light switch on my TRS-80 Color Computer—not to teach programming, of course, but to experientially engage with how code is created and how it works, in order to better understand both what code is and how it rapidly scales up in complexity. In the second half, we’ll re-implement the light-switch program on more modern hardware (my Mac) in a more modern programming language (Python), which will illustrate how the addition of more computing capabilities further increases the complexity of code, leading to all sorts of significant problems which we need to address with new tools that simplify through abstraction but which themselves add even more layers of complexity.
