Friday, April 24, 2009

Paradigm Shift

It's really rare to run up against something that's entirely new in terms of thought AND behavior, AND be aware of it when it goes down. Like that language thing, I sort of notice it eventually but I'm not really present mentally when it starts.
I just had the bizarrest thing happen, though. I actually thought of something in a way I had never thought before. And it caught me so off guard I sort of stared at my screen for a long moment.
I was toying around with all of the very neat Flash gadgets on another blogger's website when the ball got stuck in the plinko game and balanced perfectly on a peg. Throwing another ball at it didn't work, since they're coded to coexist in the same space and just slip past behind one another.
I sat there staring at it for a moment, then suddenly had the thought "You know, these are all programmed on an array, so there's no unique behavior for any of them. This is just a freak chance happening."
At which point I stopped dead in my thought process and realized that not only had I never thought in programmer language like that before, I'd recognized it in an item I was interacting with, and upon double-checking with my honey, determined that it was a correct assessment.
It's funny to realize that in that moment my thinking switched over from the land of the vaguely aware to the land of Those Who Can Pick Up Programming Patterns. If there is one. I kinda doubt it, I just wanted to set that up in capital letters. It doesn't really deserve them.
This is going to be weird going forward. I'm fascinated and kinda looking forward to it.

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