Devil In The Stack by Andrew Smith: The real Moriarty was the godfather of computers

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Devil In The Stack by Andrew Smith (Grove Press £16.99, 464pp) 

Devil In The Stack is available now from the Mail Bookshop

In 1939, at the outbreak of the Second World War, members of Britain's Government Code and Cypher School all received the message, 'Auntie Flo is not so well.' It was a coded signal that they should make their way to Bletchley Park. 

The Buckinghamshire country house was to become the centre of Allied code-breaking during the war and the place where the world's first working computer was developed.

The news about Auntie Flo's illness is just one of the offbeat pieces of information to be found in this potted history of computing. The earliest functioning computers came into existence as a result of the work of two remarkable men. 

The first was Alan Turing, the brilliant Cambridge mathematician and resident genius of Bletchley Park. 

The second was John von Neumann, a Hungarian-American, 'a bon vivant who did his best work against a backdrop of noise and motion, whether at cocktail parties or among hordes of shrieking children'. He worked on the Manhattan Project, the American-led development of the nuclear bomb, and, like Turing, was a visionary mathematician whose contribution to early computers was huge.

Andrew Smith ventures further back to two 19th-century pioneers whose ideas prefigured later developments in computing. Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord

Byron, imagined what we would call today 'software' and envisioned a new science that she named 'the science of operations'. We would call it 'computer science'.

George Boole, the son of a Lincoln shoemaker, became a mathematics professor in Cork. He is sometimes thought to have been Conan Doyle's inspiration for Sherlock

The character of Moriarty, played here by Andrew Scott (right), was inspired by real life mathematics professor, George Boole

Holmes's arch-enemy, Professor Moriarty, another brilliant mathematician. Boolean logic, as described in his 1854 work The Laws of Thought, lies behind the workings of all computers. 

As Smith puts it, 'an ethereal innovation that illuminated the world but had no clear practical use wound up changing everything a hundred years later'.

Today, computer code is 'seeping unchallenged and at an accelerating rate into every area of our existence'. Smith is fascinated by its ubiquity. He's also increasingly alarmed by it. 'From certain angles,' he writes, 'life could appear to be getting worse in eerie proportion to the amount of code streaming into it.'

He decides that the only way to discover more is to learn how to code himself. He struggles until he comes across a computing language called Python, named after Monty Python's Flying Circus. 

The computing industry is largely populated by white and Asian males. Smith quotes some disconcerting figures. Only seven per cent of coders are female, less than three per cent are black. It doesn't need to be so. It wasn't the case at Bletchley, where the first programmers were overwhelmingly female.

Smith has a great deal of fun while learning to code. He builds a program to generate Shakespearean insults. This combines genuine words from different parts of the Bard's plays to produce such memorable abuse as 'thou paunchy, weather-beaten maggot-pie' and 'thou goatish, tickle-brained puttock'.

However, much of his absorbing book asks serious questions about the direction in which the computer industry and tech giants such as Google and Meta are taking us.

 Nonetheless, despite very significant reservations, Smith remains positive about his coding odyssey. He realises he has left it too late to become a really good programmer, but 'if I were starting my life now, I might well choose computer code over prose'.