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Vicki Langer
Vicki Langer

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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)

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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!

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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

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Clive Da

painting

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Vicki Langer

Agreed. I’d like to think an outline like TDD or pseudocode

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Clive Da

lego

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Vicki Langer

Love it 😍 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?