[alexpopow]

Very nice perspective. I used to joke about the missing comment lines in the genetic code: if "God" had been a good, conscientious programmer, he would have left a reasonable amount of comments in the code to make it maintainable for all the next developers - but it seems the task went over his head, and now we have to reverse-engineer all that chaos...

[mistermann]

Alternatively, maybe all of the hints we need are available, but not where we "think" they are.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect

[dekhn]

yes, when I was a kid and already interested in computers, then learned about molecular biology (late 80s, early 90s), I definitely used that analogy to motivate my work. It really reminded me of the early MIT hackers exploring these systems that were somewhat opaque for people not in the "priesthood".