Lost In The Levels

It's been a while since writing here - roughly a year to be exact.

In that time...

I've written low-level code that flips the bit in memory to write the code that will flip the bit, then the high-level code to create the language that compiles and runs the same language. I've spent hours playing while lost in the UI and forgetting the code, and I've modelled a UI that grew to look like the code for that UI. I've sat to rest holding my wife wondering why I need to write code with her in my life. Then I head to work to write code so I can sit and for the rest of my life - hold my wife.

and in that time... I've become LostInTheLevels. That infinity of abstracted connected layers - each model mapped onto each new model in unending ways - nothing solid to grip, only the shifting sands of names and developer visions. Objects, models, code, data, patterns, logic, math - all merging into equal meaning and equally meaningless.

All I see now is are the rolling waves in an ocean of names and numbers.

Is this what was BeyondTheFormlessForm?

--LayneThomas

Perhaps this is what the Lisp guys mean by "elephants all the way down". Welcome back, Layne... it's very good to hear from you. --ScottJohnson

In an oft-told variation of the Hindu myth of cosmology, a young boy asks his father what holds up the Earth. Amused, the father assures his son that the world rests on the back of a very large turtle. "But what holds up the turtle?" the boy asks. After brief reflection, the father says, "A huge elephant." "But," the boy continues, "what is under the elephant?" Sensing that he is rapidly losing control of the conversation, the father finally exclaims, "Son, it's elephants all the way down from there!"

I thought the usual phrasing was TurtlesAllTheWayDown??

That's true, and it's not from the Lisp world, it's from the anthropological world.

TerryPratchett gets around this quite elegantly. It's a turtle, right? Turtles swim.