Thinking

One or the other books I've been reading say I have to learn to think like a programmer.

I was thinking, idly, about how Adobe Photoshop does what it does. One of the functions I rely upon is the Clone Stamp tool, a brush that allows you to clone a part of an image and paint with it, or even paint with part of an image as the selection travels over it, in relation to the tool. The brush can be small or large (or even enormous); the edge of the brush can be soft or hard or somewhere inbetween. So I'm thinking to myself, the part of the image to be reproduced has to be loaded into a specific address in memory, and then accessed and drawn onto the document‚ over and over again. The brush must use some sort of alpha channels to soften the edge (and to change the shape, as well)...

Mind you, I wouldn't know where to begin to understand how that's all done (much less how it's done along with any of the hundreds of other tools and functions in the program), but it's kinda interesting to consider in these terms.