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Coding is what, exactly? Those who do it often talk about “writing” code, and for a while in the 1980s, a group of programmers had informal meetings with members of the Writers’ Union of Canada. Our conversations were fascinating (I personally learned a lot about computing), but ultimately our two professions were too dissimilar for a single union.

Three decades later, the differences are even more profound. Computers are everywhere, and everything is computerized. Yet many of us know curiously little about the men and women who tell our machines what to do. We may resort to the cliché of the loner nerd with the one-track mind — brilliant with algorithms but ill at ease talking about them. According to Clive Thompson, however, coders are better described as a priestly class of insiders that includes self-taught hackers and college-­trained computer scientists. Together, they are the new iteration of the math genius living in plain sight next...