Different programming languages feel viscerally different, right? I can’t be the only one. It’s so embodied.
When I’m deep in multiple nested parentheses in a C-like language, even Python, I feel precarious, like I’m walking a high wire or balancing things in my hands and picking my way down steep stairs. It’s a relief to close the braces.
Like if I’m trying to cover all the conditions in a complicated state machine or a conditional, I’m high up. I often hold my breath.
Functional languages are the opposite.
I haven’t done much Haskell but what I did felt like crawling underground through caves and tunnels. Writing a text adventure game engine felt similar. Like I was making a map in the dark, kinda, and having to hold it in my head.
When I’ve written firmware, counting ops in the interrupt, it was precision work while being squeezed. To be typed with first fingers only, deliberately.
When I’m ssh’d into a device on my shelf and I’m writing code actually on the board, my sense of self is teleported over there and also I’m really really small. Opening a terminal window to a distant server is like reaching through a hatch with my arm, but a long way; ssh tunnel is well named.
Writing code with GitHub Copilot and Typescript in full flight feels like, well, flying, or at least great bounding leaps like being on the Moon. Coming back to typeless Python after writing Typescript is like stumbling drunk. It makes me feel unreliable but also hilariously giddy.
I feel tense and unsteady if I venture too far over my skis from a git commit.
Is code synesthesia a thing? If so mine is visceral, kinaesthetic.
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