@shakin said:A non-programmer friend and I had an interesting discussion today. He stated that besides DNA, there is no known naturally occurring code. The exact quote is "all codes are created by a conscious mind; there is no natural process known to science that creates coded information."I think that tree growth rings are encoded age and climate data and sedimentary layers are encoded geological data, but my friend does not agree because the data derived from those sources is a scientific conclusion based on observation of phenomenon. To him a code is like a language and can be decoded, not a pattern like tree growth rings.I'm wondering what perspective a larger programmer audience has on this matter. In programming we see codes (or encoding) like SHA-1 that does not carry the original information at all and we see ASCII codes that are certainly not a language. As an abstract concept I think things like tree rings can be codes, but that obviously doesn't work if you think of codes as precise instruments of information transfer. Does my perspective as a programmer agree with that of other programmers? If so, do programmers have a better grasp of the world of abstract codes than other people, or a warped sense of codes that doesn't make any sense?For those who haven't yet seen it, this article ( http://ds9a.nl/amazing-dna/ ) called DNA Seen Through The Eyes Of A Coder is an interesting read. Are programming languages the key to life?An interesting problem. If code is defined as the product of a conscious mind, how do you define consciousness? IS DNA a code? It is essentially a "million-monkey-typewriter" product. If a million monkeys wrote Windows Vista (which may or may not have already happened :P ) would this program then be code? But if a million neurons in our brains exchange impulses that result in a real program being written by our fingers, does that somehow have more intention behind it than the stuff the monkeys produced? The only actual difference is in how well the neural network is trained...