Codelab Chapter 01: Introduction to Codelab

Pre-Readings

• Section 1 and section 2 from Paul Ford’s What is Code? (2015)
• Donald Knuth’s “Computer Programming as an Art” (1974) - Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming is a 4000 page comprehensive computer science magnum opus, but this talk is a light one about the “Art” in that title.
• Ben Schmidt’s “Do Digital Humanists Need to Understand Algorithms?” (2016) - you shouldn’t get too bogged down on the technical details in this one.

Homework to be completed before next Codelab session

• Schedule a 1 on 1 with me in the next 2 weeks to talk about your dreams, your discontents, and your computer. We’ll also use this time to set up your development environment.
• Afterward, complete Ian Milligan and James Baker, “Introduction to the Bash Command Line,” The Programming Historian 3 (2014). This is an introduction to the Bash shell, which will serve well enough as an introduction to other shells like Zsh as well.
  • For Windows users, skip the “Windows Only: Installing Git Bash” section. Instead, use the VSCode Terminal or Windows Terminal, as recommended in the Code Lab environment setup.
• Set up an account at Github and post your username on the Slack praxis channel so I can add you to our organization.
• Hopefully I’ll have passed out copies of Julia Evans’s lovely So You Want to be a Wizard zine. That’s something written for someone who is already a programmer, but it’ll be useful for you to skim through now to gleen some meta-strategies for navigating tech. Review it again once you have a few for loops under your belt.
• For a bit of counter-programming, Miriam Posner’s “Some things to think about before you exhort everyone to code” is good to think about (and perhaps even to critique).