Metaphors we learn to program by

Great article, OP!

>Could we do more to make programming an accessible activity to the 99% of people who don’t program, by putting greater emphasis on intuitive physical analogs?

I think this would have to be done carefully.

Being able to articulate your thoughts and compute without resorting to physical analogies can greatly reduce the processing load on your brain. This is partly due to the fact that analogies always come with a baggage of extra features that are unrelated to the concept you actually care about.

Perhaps a good way to overcome this would be to carefully pick a set of analogies for a concept,then identify what about these multiple analogies helps you understand it. It would also help you abstract away the additional semantic load that comes with the chosen physical analogies.

I am however, a strong believer in the power of metaphors to democratize complex craft.

Music composition per example, can be made more intuitive and accessible by thinking of sounds events in terms of their physical analogues. In the case of sounds however, the extra semantic fat may very well be marbling on wagyu beef.

In fact, it would help us think of musical composition in a more... compositional way, i.e. combination of parts with different semantic properties that when combined following certain rules, generate an expression with a particular meaning.

Neat, I skimmed through "metaphors we live by" a few weeks ago and can't stop applying it everywhere. I recently wrote a post that's kind of on "GOOD CODE IS CLEAN" [1].

I can't recall how dependent I was on physical metaphors when I was first learning to code. I do, however, remember some times that I tried to learn concepts and a spatial metaphor set me back significantly. Like "railway-oriented" for async error handling (which just over complicated things), or "monad is a burrito" (which, was fine for when you already understood the concept, but useless before). I guess my point is that it's quite difficult to know if a metaphor is a good learning tool if you already know the concept.

[1] https://ravik.substack.com/p/an-anthropology-of-clean-code

Make sure to follow up "Metaphors We Live By" with a read of Lakoff's "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things", which explains how meaning is constructed by ultimately relating sounds to body experiences, a must-read for the interested student of linguistics (amateur or professional).

Lakoff himself talking about cognitive semantics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFgFjdCo2Js

In software architecture, metaphors may help us to better identify objects and their interaction patterns.

Hard disagree that most of these are metaphors in actual use. They’re more like mnemonics, arbitrary names for highly abstract concepts that are only incidentally borrowed from ordinary languages.

For example, I never think of a physical dictionary when using the data structure. Much less a heap or a tree (we even draw those with the root at the top!). And the stuff in the article about database queries being “supplications” is just ridiculous. It’s again an abstract idea. No idea of a the social relationship between humans ever enters the picture in any way, metaphoric or otherwise.

What’s hard about programming isn’t the names, it’s learning the concepts. At least in my opinion.

Will check them out, thanks for the recommendations!