A musical metaphor I hope to explore
A long HN Comment that says, in part:
An analogy about the relationship between programs and languages just occurred to me, which I want to note so I don't forget it: it's like the relationship between a piece of music and the instrument it was composed for. To say "this system could have been built in some other language" is like saying "this music could have been composed for another instrument". That may technically be true; music gets transcribed for other instruments all the time, just as programs get ported to other languages. But this misses the most important thing: the creative process by which the music or program got written in the first place.
An analogy about the relationship between programs and languages just occurred to me, which I want to note so I don't forget it: it's like the relationship between a piece of music and the instrument it was composed for. To say "this system could have been built in some other language" is like saying "this music could have been composed for another instrument". That may technically be true; music gets transcribed for other instruments all the time, just as programs get ported to other languages. But this misses the most important thing: the creative process by which the music or program got written in the first place.