The next book for our neighborhood book club is Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, which follows a couple of the young in Los Angeles from late childhood through their early thirties, say 1987 through 2015, as they found and continue a business that creates computer games. A book review putting it that way would not interest me in the book, but I found the book very readable. I finished its 400 pages in a week or so.
One curious aspect of the book was its detachment from the work of computer programming. It mentions the programming language Java (perhaps a few months early for Java's release), and I think might mention BASIC. Almost the only terms of art are "bug" and "debugging". "Interrupt" and "stack" you will not find.
This is not an unreasonable choice. Programming can be very absorbing, but watching somebody program is indistinguishable from watching someone stare at a screen and occasionally press on a keyboard. It takes a good deal of patience for the non-programmer to sit and watch somebody program. When I saw the movie The Social Network, I was impressed at the manner in which the writers and producers had managed to obscure this truth: in the movie programming was hardly glanced at, except when done by the drunk or the oblivious.
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