Drawing Connections

You know which two dissimilar things I've lately come to think are actually kind of similar?

Knitting and coding.

Both have a sort of obscure language and process for how you have to do things (wind the yarn around the needles this way, enclose these things in this type of brackets), and then you get a finished product that doesn't actually resemble the written pattern or code, but that derives directly from what stitches you made, or what things you put in which brackets.

Also, if you get one little thing wrong, it can totally mess up your entire afghan square/web page.

There's this similarity because you're trying to follow (or make up) instructions that come in a fairly unintuitive form, and with time and practice you gradually start to be able to work out what's going to happen as a result of which steps (ah, if I knit-purl-slip-knit here, it will come out like so in the finished square). But at first, you're really just sort of fumbling your way following directions because they're written down.

Code is in some ways easier to fix, since you can quickly make changes and then reload the page to see if it works, where you have to tear out and reknit everything back to the mistake in your square. I guess one could say that knitting patterns are in fact code, and fingers with yarn is just a fairly inefficient means of running it.

Anyway, that's my thought for the day. Now I must attempt to complete my weekly Codecademy lesson.