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side note: after dabbling into electronics and electromechanics.. I tend to see them as programming already. You're coupling geometries in a mathematical way. If you do reactive/dataflow programming that's very very similar.

Also, army videos of 40s mechanical computers hint that way I think. (in a way the meaning of programming is quite blurry)

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Those videos are amazing. Analog computers are computing by analogy, eg. rotation speed represents variable A, and the roatation position represents the integral of A. Programming an analog computer means setting up an analog of a system of differential equations, then the system computes the solution.

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