#Especially when programming languages are technically abstract metaphors used for machine code
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You could look at it like the third wife of a dying oil baron discovering his of-age son born out of wedlock.
You could look at it like a wizard conjuring forth daemons to do his bidding.
You could look at it like a high king of an empire run on the backs of slaves ruled by masters, sometimes one owning one, often times one owning many.
You could look at it like an all-encompassing, inscrutable god twisting the very landscape of the world, and calling forth simple forms of life to perform wonders and miracles upon the land that are leagues beyond its inhabitants ability to even begin to fathom.
Programming is a strange, abstract frontier where we paint the dreams of sleeping machines. Machines that think with speed of geniuses but with the comprehension of a block of wood. It is rife with metaphorical language, where we grasp at any and all words to try and foment a transferable understanding of just what the hell we are doing. We do so for ourselves to help us accomplish our work, to train newcomers to the field, and for others to know and value what we do... at least enough to still get paid.
coding got me saying shit like “target the child” “assign its class” “override its inheritance” like the third wife of a dying oil baron discovering his of-age son born out of wedlock
#Painting the dreams of sleeping machines is an excellent line#I'm going to steal that from myself to use in the future#Programming and metaphor#Goes hand in hand#Especially when programming languages are technically abstract metaphors used for machine code#Which are abstractions of CPU instructions#Which guide every assignment of 1 and 0 in every register and space in memory#And those 1s and 0s themselves are abstractions of high and low voltage levels which control the firing of transistors#Shit's complicated#This is why we use metaphors
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