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by justanothersys 2489 days ago

  I do not think of myself as a closure or a functor, unlike the Logo programmer and the turtle, but the elements of a language are features of a world I inhabit:
Here is the main difference between Logo and other languages. It’s called “Embodied Cognition” in academia.
1 comments

It's a difference in programmers, at least. I do absolutely think of myself as a functor or closure, when I'm working at that level. (Dijkstra must be rolling in his grave.) Or a structure, moving through a queue, guarded by a serial dispatch queue ... I've realized a lot about data flow by being stuck in traffic.

My programs are apparently anthropomorphic, too: I start every new feature by adding "// TODO: i need ..." comments everywhere, and then go back and do what they say. Someone watching me once remarked that my program wrote itself.

Full disclosure: I learned Logo when I was young, and then Lisp as a teenager -- two of my first languages -- so perhaps I was infected from the start.

Now I'm kind of curious how else people think of programs. Do functions and objects not have a shape and position and rhythm? How do you model them? They're not literally just symbols, are they?

I remember code as places I've been (like a memory palace), that are connected to each other by the control and data flow. So my memories of old code are quite concrete, tangible, and first-person, and I can reconstruct the details and context by remembering the other places it was connected to, and my (the program counter's) journey from place to place that I took when I first encountered those locations (loci).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci