Love & objects

This is part of a love & programming series.

While dating the teacher who had drinking issues, I learned a lot about addiction — not through practice thankfully. Watching him taught me what I think is the most important thing you need to know about addicts: the object of their addiction doesn’t matter. It’s completely replaceable. Only the pattern remains; that being the path to reaching that object.

During our — short but hectic — relationship, he switched from alcohol to painting to swimming to me to back to alcohol, and so on. All he did was to generate instances based on the same pattern.

His relationship towards love was very much the same.

In this case, the returned object almost doesn’t vary. There’s something pure about it. The parameters will always be a name and a start date, and the output, regardless of them, will follow the same logic. To be fair, let’s admit we all have patterns in terms of relationships — but we’ll see more of that in love & loops.

Now we might ask, is there such a thing as pure love? A love that doesn’t fluctuate once it has been passed a single parameter? I’m personally more prone to side effects and surprises. Because, unfortunately or not, no matter how many test cases you provide to prevent errors, a single variable will never retain the purity of a programme.