Oh, that is positively delicious.
I had my time as a youth... back when my brain was still pliant and stretchy like Silly Putty and I could wrap it around such things as nested arrays and hashes and the like... I did some programming in BBX2 and tried to translate that to C++ and tinkered with
Python LISP (Python was a later relapse in my 30s) and after a few weeks (was it months?) where the only way I could sleep was to get stoned out of my gourd I eventually wound up stranded in a dry spell and tried to drink the code away...
I had my epiphany in a bathroom stall at a Starbuck's after being politely asked to leave for conspicuously pouring gin in my iced Frappucino and yelling at another patron in line for jostling my arm and almost making me spill it; I dashed away just in time to empty the contents of my stomach on and around the toilet. I realized that I was a few nested parens away from just the sort of madness your author distills perfectly here:
Vast chains of abstract conditions and requirements have to be picked through to discover things like missing commas. Doing this all day leaves you in a state of mild aphasia as you look at people’s faces while they’re speaking and you don’t know they’ve finished because there’s no semicolon.
Eventually every programmer wakes up and before they're fully conscious they see their whole world and every relationship in it as chunks of code, and they trade stories about it as if sleepiness triggering acid trips is a normal thing that happens to people. This is a world where people eschew sex to write a programming language for orangutans.
I have LITERALLY been
this and laughed about it to my girlfriend who got me into programming; she was trouble, I wanted to taste that kind of trouble (and her toes) and she had the best weed; things just took a 40/20 downward spiral from there. When I came to my senses in that bathroom stall, I realized she'd already moved on to another victim, and I was either going to become the freak I saw in the mirror or more likely, WISH I was halfway good enough to be that creepy and get away with it. Knowing that I was fundamentally math-deficient, I decided to go sober up over breakfast at Waffle House and the rest is history.
Not sure if I was lucky or just stupid...
mnem
I took the red pill AND the blue pill. Now we are unanimous.