The Life-Changing Mysteries of Coding

Writing computer code can be so easy — and so hard at the same time

Illustration: Simon Pitt

This is what coding is: You type some special words into a text editor. It probably has a black background. Some of those words turn different colors as you type them. Once you’ve typed all the special words, you save, or save and build, or press compile. And then you look at the output…