Great article, OP!<p>>Could we do more to make programming an accessible activity to the 99% of people who don’t program, by putting greater emphasis on intuitive physical analogs?<p>I think this would have to be done carefully.<p>Being able to articulate your thoughts and compute without resorting to physical analogies can greatly reduce the processing load on your brain. This is partly due to the fact that analogies always come with a baggage of extra features that are unrelated to the concept you actually care about.<p>Perhaps a good way to overcome this would be to carefully pick a set of analogies for a concept,then identify what about these multiple analogies helps you understand it. It would also help you abstract away the additional semantic load that comes with the chosen physical analogies.<p>I am however, a strong believer in the power of metaphors to democratize complex craft.<p>Music composition per example, can be made more intuitive and accessible by thinking of sounds events in terms of their physical analogues. In the case of sounds however, the extra semantic fat may very well be marbling on wagyu beef.<p>In fact, it would help us think of musical composition in a more... compositional way, i.e. combination of parts with different semantic properties that when combined following certain rules, generate an expression with a particular meaning.