What Movies Don’t Understand About Coding
The widespread adoption of computers by the public in the 80s and 90s created new worlds and subcultures for movies and television to explore and include in their stories.
The world was changing in a huge way, and what an otherwise ‘normal’ character could do expanded by a lot if they knew how to write code or hack into websites and databases.
That being said, most of the people writing and directing film know nothing about the world of computers and they’re working in a medium where making look dynamic and interesting is the number one priority.
On top of this, many film productions don’t have the budget or interest in bringing on a technical advisor for computer programming. For this reason, the same way that movies about chess will sometimes have nonsense games that just look ‘chess-ey’, movies with computers will have nonsense programming and hacking scenes that just look ‘computer-ey’.
Here are a few of the most common and most obvious sins committed by movies that want to portray coding but don’t put in their research:
Nobody ever uses codebases.
In real life, one of a developer’s most important tools is copy and paste. When you’re developing a program, there is simply no reason to reinvent the wheel or spend unnecessary time laying out the basics if it’s already been done by you or other people before in a way that reliably works.
It’s not like this is taboo or something, websites publishing JavaScript libraries and sharing parts of their source code is extremely common, and doing stuff like helps out the whole community. Who knows, maybe characters starting from scratch with blank pages are just trying to increase their billable hours or something…
It all magically works the first time.
Probably the most unbelievable part of writing code in movies is that someone just bangs out a full working program all at once, fingers flailing like a madman, and somehow it always works on the first go.
Anyone who’s paid to write on a computer for a living, whether it’s stenographers, assistants, data enterers, at least makes typos here and there that they have to go back and correct.
I’d love to see a movie one day where the ‘hacker’ of a team writes out a program, it doesn’t work, and then they have to spend an hour and a half looking back through all of the code to see where their typo or logic error is hiding. Meanwhile, the rest of their team has to just sit around, grab a coffee or go for a walk until the program finally works.
It’s always done at an ‘important looking’ computer terminal.
Likely out of a desire to make working on a computer seem more ‘glamourous’ or something, so much movie coding takes place in a series of dark rooms with enormous computer terminals built into the floor with oversized and fancy displays that don’t really add much to the work experience.
Part of what is so powerful about computers is that they’re portable and usable anywhere. Even though it might not look as technically impressive to see someone sitting in bed, or working at their dining table, it would get across the idea that what’s really so powerful about coding and computers is that anyone can do it from anywhere, and there’s not a lot that you can do to stop them.
That being said, these mistakes are not that serious. Movies and TV are trying first and foremost to entertain people, and unfortunately, watching people develop software in real-time is just not all that interesting if you don’t understand what they’re doing.
That being said, there are some movies, like the Social Network or the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo for example, that do a pretty good job of making something that can hold the attention of the audience and be reasonably accurate to what working on computers tends to look like. Here’s hoping we see more films like them.
If you want to see more examples of coding in movies and TV, as well as some explanation about where the source code being shown on screen is coming from, visit this Tumblr page written by a British programmer. The amount of research he puts into code that pops up on the screen for a few seconds at a time is incredible.
