When you've learned two subjects with some depth, you start seeing some analogies. Paul Graham thinks that hacking is very much like painting, and this guy thi

When you've learned two subjects with some depth, you start seeing some analogies. Paul Graham thinks that hacking is very much like painting, and this guy thinks that writing code is like writing English, and at one point in my life I believed that coding in Perl has a lot in common with calculating cross sections. That doesn't really mean that these things are any more similar than two random areas of human activity. Our brains are just good at finding analogies, finding analogies is like spotting patterns, we see them even when there aren't any and when there actually are some their appeal is difficult to overcome. And if you know two subjects well you have more material to cherrypick analogous things from.