A novel of ideas · 2026
A journey through the years that shook
programming languages
A single night to walk through the rooms where it all started.
Synopsis
Midnight, an empty file on screen. A programmer looks for the words to tell the story of programming languages. Then a voice behind him: David Bowie. A dream journey begins through the rooms where it all started, from Bletchley Park to MIT, from Zurich to Bell Labs, from Oslo to Silicon Valley, and through the people who invented the way we speak to machines. At dawn the dream ends, the guide dissolves, and only the road remains.
The opening
Midnight. The screen on, the room dark.
A file opened to write a book about programming languages. Empty, not a single line, only the cursor blinking, stubborn as a question.
It was the sixteenth of February. Despite the heating, the room was cold, a thin cold, the kind that comes in through closed windows and reaches the bones before the skin. Outside, Castenedolo slept, and the dark over the village merged with the dark over the Bassa Bresciana.
Inside the room, another silence, less calm: the silence of my memories, of my reading, of everything I thought I knew, everything that had now gone quiet in front of the blank page. I didn't yet know that a single night would take me through all of it.
What you’ll find
A narrative journey across seventy years of programming languages, told as a single night.
Backus, Hopper, McCarthy, Dijkstra, Kay, Ritchie, Stroustrup, Armstrong, Milner, met in the rooms where they made history.
David Bowie as Virgil: provokes, listens, recognizes. Chaos as method, fear as engine.
The author
Polyglot Programmer · Co-founder and CTO @ Codermine
I have been writing software for over twenty years. I call myself, with all due modesty, a polyglot programmer: a cap for every language, a t-shirt for every conference. Passionate about the history of computing, I’m a co-founder and CTO at Codermine.
Where to buy
Amazon.com