"The Stack" Translating between the digital microcosmos and our analog human minds involves a fiendish tradeoff: make your language quicker and easier for the machine to process and it grows proportionally more alien to humans. Make it accessible and intuitive to us, however, and you commit the machine to lots of extra work-thereby handicapping the central processing unit and introducing new layers of complication; of code to go wrong. Computerists use the metaphor of "The Stack" to describe this relationship. The Surprising World of Coding Languages I heard that coders used a range of "languages" to communicate with the machine, and that there were thousands of these human-computer Creoles, including a few dozen major ones; that each had its own culture, aesthetic, and passionate claque of followers. By this account programming languages were not only communication tools, but also windows into the world, ways of seeing and being with definable and sometimes conflicting epistemological underpinnings. There could be rivalry bordering on animus between communities-a tension coders half-jokingly referred to as "religious wars/' on the grounds that no one involved was ever going to change their mind or attachment. In his Fifties, a Writer Learn to Code Programming was notorious as a difficult endeavor that most novices walked away from. Assuming I could learn (an assumption I was in no way entitled to make), would computing's binary logic force me to become more binary? This was not a trivial concern.

My life and work had been built on shades of gray and lateral motion of thought; on challenging "clearly defined boundaries" where I saw their semblance. Would immersion in code reprogram my cerebral operating system, narrowing its scope? Brain Scans to Show How the Coding Mind Arises and Evolves For the time being, computers and brains remain glaringly different. One of the things I hope these scans will help me assess is whether computers are on their way to matching brains, or whether through constant interaction and adaptation both are on a path to meeting in the middle, coming to resemble each other by a process of equalization. The plan is to come back for a second scan if and when I'm more proficient, to see if my brain functions differently in detectable ways. Coding will change my brain. The question of how turns out to be more engrossing than I could possibly have imagined.