DEV Community

Vicki Langer
Vicki Langer

Posted on

Programming Metaphors

Last week I wrote about how programming and cooking are similar.

This week, I've come across tons of things that could be metaphors for programming. What are your best metaphors for programming?

Top comments (6)

Collapse
 
annarankin profile image
Anna Rankin

I love this! I've always liked the idea of sketching as a development workflow: you draw rough sketches to figure out an approach (or mess around with libraries/patterns in code), then once you know how you want your drawing (or feature) to work, you lay it out (good place to use tdd!) and elaborate on it until it's ready to ship!

Collapse
 
vickilanger profile image
Vicki Langer

What an awesome metaphor. A drawing project is a lot like a coding project.
Maybe:
shapes = part of a statement
Quick sketch = pseudocode
Erasing/fixing = debugging
Printing/publishing = shipping/push to prod

Collapse
 
osde8info profile image
Clive Da

painting

Collapse
 
vickilanger profile image
Vicki Langer

Agreed. Iā€™d like to think an outline like TDD or pseudocode

Collapse
 
osde8info profile image
Clive Da

lego

Collapse
 
vickilanger profile image
Vicki Langer

Love it šŸ˜ Lego is a very natural feeling metaphor for code. Code is just a bunch of building blocks, that hopefully look and work right when done, right?