I think a lot of programmers secretly want to be carpenters.

What happened to good old car analogies? This carpenter stuff is a little too waxed moustache hipster for me.

Modern cars are incredibly complex and car engineering/manufacturing has really complex lifecycles. It is quite difficult to make an analogy with a thing that requires a lot of analogies to in the first place to explain.

Carpentry/woodworking is somewhat simple. With a saw, planer, router, sander and a few primitive hand tools you can finish most woodworking projects. Most of the complexity of woodworking is in the accuracy/quality. Woodworking is simply easy to be conceptually* familiar with.

There's no irony in this statement unless you assume that "HN" is one person who you expect to be consistent.

I think we all visit HN because of the many people and varying opinions and ways of thinking. I hope we continue to see conflicting thought processes like this!

Also HN: lets take a few comments and pretend that's everybody on HN ;)

So what do carpenters use for analogies?

Software Engineering.

"Just imagine the facade is the frontend."