Programming is writing

I think a lot of self-styled "programmers" think of writing code as something totally different from "normal" writing because they've conceptualized themselves as precise and mathematical and rigorous, and writing as soft (emasculating!) and imprecise (the horror of ambiguity!) and humanities-aligned (my credential-based sense of superiority!).

Little does this strawman I made up realize, programming is writing. The writing has its own syntax and conventions, but the only way to get code is to have it written. And since writing is thinking, programming is also just thinking—but the form it imposes lets you articulate some thoughts more easily than others, to the point that you can programmatically interpret them and wowee, suddenly your thoughts are electrons on a little chip (someone cobbled together some cool ideas to come up with that) and they're out doin' stuff like putting pixels on a screen to make a neat website, or sending "Hello" to your pals, or commodifying existence itself at an unfathombale scale for fun but mostly profit. (Hey, I didn't say all the ideas were good ideas.)

Following that corollary of coding-is-writing-is-thinking, if your job is programming things, your job is really just thinking, but you're supposed to externalize those thoughts into a particular artifact.

Anyways, that little mantra has recently been a way I trick myself into doing something productive. A lot of times I have plenty of high-level thoughts about something, but I don't know where to start when it comes to coding it up. But if I tell myself that any kind of writing is fundamentally the same stuff as code, I can usually start jot things down until the pieces start to fit together enough to crystalize them into something that looks like functioning software.