The purpose of the code

I was deep into a mapping algorithm the other day. The code wasn’t doing what I expected, so I spent hours interpreting what it was telling me about itself and the data. The next day, while listening to Chris Lattner on the Latent Space podcast, I heard something I couldn’t agree with more:

Code isn’t really about telling the computer what to do. Code is about humans being able to understand what code does.

That’s the beauty of the code. It mirrors your assumptions. It teaches you to think more broadly. It also reveals the data points you might have overlooked.