I&#x27;ll take your analogy and run with it, to note the extreme focus on symbolism in programming.<p>Its all about the copy by reference vs copy by value, type systems, etc.<p>Now when the medieval mystics wanted to talk enlightenment values, politics, psychology, political science, but the local powers that be were not down with the cool new stuff, they got obscurely alchemical, astrological, or divinational to avoid having the local leaders figure out what they were saying and therefore separate head from body via guillotine.  Long after both the topics, and schemes they used to obscure the topics, were no longer contemporary and relevant, we laugh at the ancient alchemists.<p>Come to think of it, don&#x27;t the cool kids programmers laugh at BASIC, assembly, C++, perl?  Yet another similarity.  Ha ha those ancient mystics trying to write quicksort in BASIC, LOL.