I do not like to be negative, but perhaps this book could be titled -- DNA seen through the eyes of a coder who does not know any biology. The genome is not a

I do not like to be negative, but perhaps this book could be titled -- DNA seen through the eyes of a coder who does not know any biology. The genome is not a computer program with lots of #ifdef's. It is a data store, much of which seems to be evolutionary left-overs, and a tiny fraction of which encodes the molecular machines that allow it to function. Depending on how you define decoding, perhaps less than 10% of the enzymes encoded by the genome (which are encoded by less than 0.2% of the genome) are involved in processing the genome data (DNA polymerase, RNA polymerase, ribosomal proteins, topoisomerase, etc). A larger fraction of enzymes are used to provide the energy and raw materials to keep the cell going, with an additional set of enzymes used for cell signaling. And much of the rest of the proteins in the cell (again, remembering that less than 2% of the human genome is protein coding) are used for structural purposes. The genome has a large amount of potential information. In higher organisms and higher plants, a very small fraction (2-5%) of that data is evolutionarily conserved to the extent that we think we know what it does (many of us think the rest is literally evolutionary junk). The parts we understand encode molecular machines, but it takes a very broad definition of "code" to imagine that data is a program.