Great stuff, as ever, over on The Fish Wrapper. This is my response to Martha’s latest post.

The computer is not only a tool but a meta-tool; I think that’s what makes it so hard at some points to “get” computers. A computer is a tool that morphs into other tools. This, I think, is what calling the computer a “universal machine” is all about. As the author of “Dreaming in Code” noted on a recent IT Conversations podcast, programming is pure imagination, nothing else. Rigorous and ordered imagination, but also weirdly arbitrary, and sometimes uncanny (this is me talking now, if there was any doubt).

Getting people to think of computers as tools is the first step. But then there’s the next step, in which they think of the computer as a tool the way they think of their brains as tools. The brain is a tool that makes tools, and then uses them once they’re made. And every so often it will indeed crash….