first story, inshallah

yusuf: hey alex, do you mind if i call you alexandra to highlight that you are actually a female?

alex: well, yusuf, do you mind if i call you …

javed: alex stopped talking and kicked yusuf.

yusuf: isn’t it embarrassing that you have no other way to express yourself? this is how the uncreative people among us share their thoughts.

alex: next time i will, inshallah, kick you harder. my mistake, sorry for that.

yusuf: well, my dear alexandra, please you do not have to apologize for that.

javed: yusuf laughed and ran away. he was already seeing alex’s foot coming in his direction. after some running …

alex: fine, fine, fine. i wanted to kick you once, but now i am thirsty. let’s go to starbucks?

yusuf: really? so you want to drink the blood of children?

alex: oh sorry, i forgot that starbucks supports the terrorist regime of israel. then, let us just go to this supermarket over there. chances are that they also do not care much about the lives of innocent people. however, for the moment at least, we do not know anything about their support for israel.

yusuf: do you drink this because you think you will get a beard, my dear lady?

alex: i have more beard than you, you ape.

yusuf: are you jealous of my banana?

alex: no. yusuf, usually when you talk i do not listen to you.

yusuf: sure.

alex: you were talking quite a bit about coding and how great it is. you can do this and that with it. i think if i would appreciate you as a human being and give you some of my very high-class attention, you might even talk the whole day about coding.

yusuf: hey high-class lady, what is it that you want to say?

alex: please for the next time, do not interrupt me when i am about to talk trash about you. now, my point is, i think i would like to know a few things about coding.

yusuf: oh nice, i was hoping, one day, inshallah, you would also start being an actual human and get some interest in coding. i still wouldn’t say you are a human, but …

alex: yeah, but what?

yusuf: yeah, you are right, calling you human would be an insult to us humans. however, i still love the idea of talking to you about coding. what is it, my dear alexandra, you want to know about coding?

alex: whether i can code something that would kick you 24 times a day, so i do not have to do it. no, actually, i would like to know, what exactly is coding?

yusuf: isn’t the question a bit too short?

alex: yes, the question might be short, but i have no knowledge about coding at all. thus, i also do not know how to even ask about that topic.

yusuf: sure, coding is, to put it simply, you write something and the computer does it.

alex: great, what do you write and why does the computer do it?

yusuf: when i say write, i really mean text. text like you would read in a book.

alex: yeah, but the book cannot talk to the computer.

yusuf: great, you said that very well. the code is talking to the machine. or let us be more correct, you somehow can talk to the computer. you write something and the computer understands it.

alex: the computer understands it and me?

yusuf: when we both talk to each other, we both have our language. in fact, we have much more than just our language. you know i call you alexandra, i know you like to be kicked by me.

alex: wait a minute, you are kicked by me, not me by you.

yusuf: that does not matter. we have our words, we speak, we have our facial expressions, we have our somewhat own culture. people listening to us or just viewing us would not understand what we are actually doing. they would see you kicking me and tell you that you are doing something wrong. the deep friendship behind it would not be known by others.

alex: i see. i mean sure, kicking you is indeed something i enjoy for my life.

yusuf: so, we might say that our way to communicate is more than just language. or let us put it this way, our language consists of words, non-verbal communication, and some over the years evolved standards.

alex: i see. and most of the people from outside would not understand what is actually going on.

yusuf: yeah, exactly. the same way, the computer has its own language that we humans can learn.

alex: i got it. there are some kinds of patterns we have to learn in order to get our demands fulfilled by the pc. he has to obey me, the user.

yusuf: nobody obeys you and also, i said only humans can learn that language. so, i am very sorry, you do not fulfill the very basic requirements for me talking any longer to you about pcs or in a large talking to you at all.

alex: you are just angry at me because i look much better than you. now jealous guy, tell me more about that language.

yusuf: see, when you want to talk to the pc, you do not need to kick it. what i mean by that is, for starters, it is just fine to know some words. when i say words, i literally mean words. if you can just type these words, you are good to go.

alex: okay, where do i write these words?

yusuf: the long answer is, you can write these words in any editor you can open. do you know the editor in windows? i think the editor is really called editor, or maybe notepad. i don’t remember.

alex: give me the short version.

yusuf: there are some tools. these are also editors, however, they have some features. in them, you would just write your words and then hit the run key. or in my case, use keyboard shortcuts.

alex: wait a minute, so i would write some words, hit run and then the computer would just follow these words?

yusuf: exactly, my dear darling.

javed: alex grabs yusuf and puts him in a headlock and does not seem to let him go.

alex: so, now you are in the proper position to talk to me. let’s say i would know about these tools and would know how to hit the run command. still, i would not understand the words i had to enter. what are these words?

yusuf: i, inshallah, will answer you one question in this headlock and then i will tell your mother that i now fully understand why she thinks you would be a much better daughter than a son.

javed: alex and yusuf laugh and alex lets yusuf go.

yusuf: in order to learn these words, you first need to have a beard like i do.

alex: sorry, i cannot see the invisible. maybe i should call the ambulance.

yusuf: next, if you want to learn these words, we can directly jump into learning coding. because learning these special words is one of the very fundamental parts of coding.

alex: ah, nice. and what are the other parts?

yusuf: other parts of coding are to be an analytical thinker. so you need to be able to fully understand what you want or what the task demands. you might have your developer tools that give you code completion, check your code errors while you are typing, you might be good with shortcuts and you might know about hardware and some other also very important things.

alex: coding is more than just typing these words and hitting on run?

yusuf: not really, but writing a book is also not more than just writing words onto paper, right?

alex: ah, i see. you mean, the author has to think a lot, he might even think about font size and other stuff before actually starting to write. so coding is at the core just writing and hitting on run. but if you are a coder, you know that there is much more to it.

yusuf: exactly, nicely said. in the same way, we have to answer a lot of other questions before you start coding.

alex: give me some examples.

yusuf: why do you want to learn how to code? what’s your motivation? which field do you want to learn coding for? answers to these questions will decide which language you should learn.

alex: wait what, there are multiple coding languages?

yusuf: yes, my dear darling, there are multiple coding languages. also, how much time do you want to spend learning to code? what kind of person are you? are you like me, who loves being effective with shortcuts? do you care about the tools you use, or are you just fine with old-fashioned tools that at least are known to work? do you think you want to code in your future, in your free time, professionally, or just try it out once? are you cool like me and thus want to have a dark theme and being able to write some addons for your code editor or are you boring like you are?

alex: i see, a lot of questions. it seems like you wanted to continue.

yusuf: yes, i wan…

javed: alex interrupted yusuf.

alex: yeah, i got it. for the moment i think this was, inshallah, enough. let us continue, inshallah, later on.

yusuf: you use inshallah a lot, although you are officially a non-muslim.

alex: officially and non-officially i am a non-muslim. but because you are saying inshallah all the time, i have integrated it into my regular language.

mashallah, let’s recap

yusuf: you know i love to recap things we talked about.

alex: yes, sure, go ahead.

yusuf: i think we, inshallah, have understood what coding means - in let’s say a very rough way. how would you describe what coding means in some brief terms?

alex: at the core, coding means to write some text in an editor and then hit on run. the run command will tell the computer what to do with the words we have written.

yusuf: mashallah, great.