Kevin Huang | Finding My Programming Language in a Roman Bookshop

Nine thousand kilometres from home, in a language I could not read, on a shelf in Rome — a book I already owned in Chinese.

I found it in a bookshop near the centre of Rome in January 2018, browsing the technical section the way engineers do in unfamiliar cities, mostly out of habit. There was a book on my favourite programming language, printed in English and Italian. I recognised it immediately, because the Mandarin edition was available in Taiwan and I had read it there.

That coincidence has stayed with me longer than most things from the trip. Programming languages are one of the very few genuinely global technical vocabularies. The same syntax, the same standard library, the same idioms, taught from what is recognisably the same text, to a student in Taipei and a student in Rome — with only the prose around the code changing. Nobody planned that. It emerged because the code itself does not need translating, so the industry converged on shared references almost by accident.

There is something else in it, which I did not have words for at twenty-two. Software work makes you portable in a way that most professions do not. I have carried that since: the specific reassurance of walking into a bookshop in a country where I could not order lunch confidently and finding a shelf I could read.

I still work as an engineer. I build and run Metablox.co, handling the whole technical stack myself, and I still browse the technical section in every city I visit.

— Kevin Huang (黃冠融 / Guan Rong Huang), Metablox.co