I just had a crazy dream about programming (this usually happens after I’ve been struggling with some coding problem or a vicious meatball sandwich before bed). But not this time. I haven’t been coding and my dinner was boring.

I was back in college and had to pick up something at the library. I walked into the library to find a bunch of ladies behind desks. One says to me, “Oh, you’re late, but you can still register in time for the HASH programming contest”. I mumble back, “Um, OK”. I have no idea what HASH is, but everyone else seems to know what it is. She signs me up and hands me a packet of stapled together handwritten questions. I walk into the next room and there’s all these teams going at it feverishly on blackboards. It’s exciting. All the teams are going to town on the questions and HASH-ing like crazy. Some switch out team members mid problem, but only one is writing on the board at a time.

I was enjoying myself watching these teams. But I had to really urgently pick something up, but I didn’t really know what it was. I was about to leave and I also had some anxiety about failing some kind of EE college class (I haven’t been in college in 20 years). It was the dream trying to pull me down some familiar road of some subconscious anxiety. But the pull of HASH was too powerful and I hung around to watch the chaos.

The question the team was working on ‘What was her last name?’ There were a few handwritten clues below this handwritten question. The clues were math like problems, algorithm problems, and other stuff I can’t remember. Each clue led to a letter. One team member was working on it and if they got it or got stuck they would hand off to another and the other person would take over. Now, this is where the HASH part happened.

When you HASH you are free to use any computer language, math routines, or any thing else that’s human readable. It’s basically like removing the barriers of compilers and computers and just putting up a new HASH{…} block that does something inside it, but interoperates with everything around it. For example, you have a handy javascript algorithm memorized for doing something, but you’re writing in C++, just put a HASH around it and jump to another language. You could do this mid equation even, like ‘Let A = HASH { javascript: Blah Blah Blah }’

Back to the dream: Someone who looks like they’re in charge says ‘Times up!’ and looks at the results on the blackboards. One answer looks good, but it has one letter wrong. Her name was ‘Ms. Ambersand’ not ‘Ms. Ampersand’ and I’m thinking to myself, in the dream, ‘are you kidding me?’ and then I woke up.

But.

The lingering idea of HASH stuck with me. And that’s why I’m writing this down. I know the idea of hash already means something in computer science. I love hash tables like everyone else, but this is different. It’s all CAPS. Plus, it was HASH in my dream so I’m sticking with HASH.

There is a need for something like HASH. We say things like full-stack developer, but what we really need is something like —

”you’re free to use whatever language that you want, whenever you want.”

That’s the key. Quit worring about how it all works together, HASH will figure it out and you’re free to HASH. Quit worrying about compilers, library conflicts, versions, computer setups, etc.

Wouldn’t it be cool to just delineate some code with the HASH directive and some indication of what kind of code it is and then it automagically fires off some docker instance to return the answer in the middle of some completely different code language? I see a future where there is no manual control over compilers and computer configurations. Some AI does it all for you, you just program in whatever language suits you and the AI does the rest to pull it all together.

Has something like this already been done? Am I a complete noob? (That last one was rhetorical)

Anyway, it was just a dream, literally.