this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2026
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Programming
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I've been "programming" for over 40 years.
In many ways, if not all, it's like creating art.
Perhaps it's best explained by saying that what I do is translate ideas into ephemeral castles constructed of notional bricks written in imaginary languages and presented to an audience with little or no understanding of the fragility of the whole piece.
It's also what pretty much runs our world, from water filtration through food production, space exploration to shopping, transport and telescopes, research and recreation.
Programming is the first tool that humans came up with that allowed us to explore ideas too large to fit in our brains and even now, being overrun by Assumed Intelligence and Unsupervised Text Extruders, it's still the most exciting part of humanity.
First of all, I like the alliteration of examples I always struggle with things like that, and alliteration is an obvious (now, to me) bridge for these.
Another excellent explanation of programming.
And it really does describe the programming of tasks, from punch card weaving machines, to punch card data entry, to direct data entry, to punch card processing, direct processing, and eventually the whole Operating System, Assembly, and Higher Level Languages... And all of the steps between that have since developed.
You can become an expert in memory management, and that idea fits into your brain. And you build the APIs that mean memory management doesn't have to fit into other people's brains. So they can work on instruction optimisation, or storage optimisation.
Standing on the shoulders of giants.
There is so much that can be solved with programming these days, but actual people have so much more... Peoplesness, humanity, realness... That some things aren't worth programming yet... That problem hasn't been solved yet