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GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH
Gretchen McCulloch is WIRED's resident linguist. She's the cocreator of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics, and her book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language comes out July 23, 2019, from Riverhead (Penguin).
This year marks the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web, so there's been a lot of pixels spilled on "the initial promises of the web"—one of which was the idea that you could select "view source" on any page and easily teach yourself what went into making it display like that. Here's the very first webpage, reproduced by the tinker-friendly programming website Glitch in honor of the anniversary, to point out that you can switch to the source view and see that certain parts are marked up with <title> and <body> and <p> (which you might be able to guess stands for "paragraph"). Looks pretty straightforward—but you're reading this on an English website, from the perspective of an English speaker.
Now, imagine that this was the first webpage you'd ever seen, that you were excited to peer under the hood and figure out how this worked. But instead of the labels being familiar words, you were faced with this version I created, which is entirely identical to the original except that the source code is based on Russian rather than English. I don't speak Russian, and assuming you don't either, does <заголовок> and <заглавие> and <тело> and <п> still feel like something you want to tinker with?
"CODING LANGUAGE"
Code depends on English—for reasons that are entirely unnecessary at a technical level.
CODING IS FOR EVERYONE
AS LONG AS YOU SPEAK ENGLISH