I once dreamed up a way to send cake through a fax machine. When I woke up, I remained convinced for about 5 minutes that the solution would work.
My solution was all in code, but yeah. Spend enough time with your head in a domain and the dreams get wierd.
This speaks to me. I always have some sort of vague dream about writing a program to do something that is just a physical problem, or like decides how other people think. Writing it down is very confusing because it very clearly made absolutely no sense. But in my dream I felt like a genius and wizard.
I read functional instead of fictional and thought John was dunking on functional programming.
When I was a very junior EE I ended up working mostly on microcontroller code. There was one bit of extremely ugly code I inherited that parsed a terribly designed serial communication protocol by using a giant maze of nested if statements. I really wanted to rewrite it to something better, but I never quite came up a solution while I worked there. Years later after I was no longer at the company I had a stress dream about it and finally came up with a working solution. I still wish I could go fix it. I really hope it's no longer used, or that someone else has finally fixed it.
It's all fun and games until you're assigned fictional tickets at work -_-