Never Seen This 'Code: Of Life' Before
The longest industrial use of programming code I had seen was in 2011, it was for a vehicle assessment monitoring system at the biggest bridge in Sumatra, called Madura (not the Uchiha clan, yeah). It was 16 pages (the heck I printed it for before?), commissioned by my previous workplace to provide a monitoring data display of daily passing vehicles on the bridge. Yeah, my first on-the-field project.
The challenge was how to identify the types and number of vehicles crossing the bridge. Consider this is between the era of Flintstone, where I may need to observe and make tally marks (1 cross 4), and Elon Musk's LiDAR at TESLA. Also, you can't afford a specific unit of police traffic with a speed trap detector. We don't have the privileges during that time.
Since the data needs to be acquired and stored regularly for the authority's monitoring purposes, that's where a system is required from data acquisition to data monitoring. It was my supervisor who programmed the code, compromising a lot of '<when>' and '<if>' since we are visualising an inclusive category of vehicle. I experienced all these during my first year working as a sales instrument engineer.
How to calculate them?
They range from 2 wheels (bike), 4 wheels (car, van, SUV, MPV & small lorry), 6 wheels (medium-sized lorry) to 16 wheels. The trick is, the pulses generated through the displacement sensors within a period of a second will determine the no. of wheels. A shorter vehicle will have and shorter peak, while longer vehicle will have more than that and required to cross with the no. of wheels.
This might not be even close to the utmost accurate approach during that time, but it helps to get the minimum number to start with. Meanwhile, super-duper high-load vehicles can be monitored through the CCTV.
For the three days 'camping on site from sensor installation to getting the first batch of data, it was extremely exhausting, and unfortunately, I can't share the result. You can just imagine there are kinds of ECG spikes until nth number, 2 spikes that have a closer gap are motorcycle, while longer wheel base, such as car, van, small lorry, have wider gaps, and so on.
Then, I met again CSS theme in Friendster skin theme, WordPress custom theme, and their plugin, and now voila, the code is now provided by AI straight from the oven. Even today, we can just do vibecoding to create an app or system. Do I know to code now? I need to relearn, while learning something else.
Something else that is interesting too.
The Underlying Substances
It happened when I started to deepen my understanding of the Quran, at the same time, I wanted to improve my communication strategy from a marketing and branding perspective. I have a gut feeling that these two entities have a unique relationship, concerning the governance of the communication system, particularly in the programming.
Where does this gut feeling come from?
It is utterly amazing to see us, humans creating a lot of innovations in today's landscape of reality and virtual, thus providing a leap of ease in our lives by automating some of our loop of routines, with their products or services and how to use them all. But how do we have the intelligence to do so?
Humans created an innovation,
and we feel amazed by the creators.
The Creator created mankind;
shouldn't we feel amazed too?
I began to explore books that explained the semantic structure, which is one of the linguistic studies regarding the precision of word choice in the Arabic language used in the Quran, and its thematic structure across the 1st to 114th chapters.
To get a glimpse, it is a holy book, but you will feel like you are reading a fiction genre where each chapter might or might not tell the story of one plot.
It could be a fiction with an unseen reality (if you love watching movies).
It has some interconnected themes,
It has intertwined messaging that also appears in a few other chapters.
It has a specified knot-type connection between threads.
It has a designated and curated word depending on the context.
It already stated the ending, but you still need to read it again.
But when you read it for the second time, you will find something else.
If you haven't read about the structure of Al-Fatiha, I am recommending the book to you, and you may read it here.
The Concept of Parallelism & Inverted Parallelism
Those who studied linguistics or are experts in languages can easily comprehend the explanation. Or, anyone who loves to make wordplay with the same phonetic, 'pantun' or poet, two-sentence punch line, or some jokes from Alien Dad Jokes might be interested.
Parallelism means that you are talking within the same and relatable message or topic, while the inverted version means a 'sudden-hitting-a-bump' feeling to another topic, at least that's how our prefrontal cortex perceives it.
Note that semantic and thematic co-exist, neither to abandon one concept over another. Try to trace back what the common words are that we used to say daily:
"What do you want to eat my dear?".
She replied, "I feel like I want to have sushi".
There's an elaboration of the type of food after the verb, eat.
It also works with different words or sentences, such as "what do you want to fill your appetite?", or "Do you have any culinary desires?", depending on who and what context. These are all parallelism, and in other form:
The question is an A.
The reply is an A'
or
A
A'
Another example:
"What do you want to eat, Honey?". She replied, "I don't want to eat! You just make me mad!". This is a parallel because it still in the same topic.
In other words:
The question is an A.
The reply is an A' too.
or
A
A'
Next one,
"What do you want to eat Oh My Beloved Person?".
She replied, "Oh dear, do you remember why our neighbour's are behaving so weird lately?".
This is an inverted parallelism, where the topic suddenly changes and takes time to connect to the original topic. (Does the situation seem familiar to you?😂 )
In other words:
The question is an A.
But the continuation is now a different topic, so it is B.
Since different topics cannot be aligned in the same line. So it will be:
A
B
Something like that, as a basic idea.
If she continues on the same topic, it will be:
A
B
A'
A to A' - is parallelism, while A to B is inverted parallelism.
We can see that B is composing at the center, acting as a mirror or ring composition for A to A' loop. With this arrangement, the loop is now symmetrical.
In the Quran, you can experience this stunning pattern within a verse (in short or long verse), in between the verses in the same chapter, or even in between the chapters. Out of 114 chapters, the first chapter governs the entire pattern, the semantic and thematic structure.
Here's how the opening chapter, also the most familiarise chapter we read daily in the 5 different times, Al-Fatiha, was discovered by Dr.Raymond Farrin and expressed through these visuals:
Is the Quran teaching humans how to code?
That's not the literal understanding to jump over; instead, I would love to say it again, the remarkable structure. After I read the books, I will read the translation and tafsir again, with an additional exercise, in which I will begin to map the schematic structure, based on the semantic and thematic identity. I would recommend that you do it too.
You will be seeing the pattern alive, and you are questioning the intelligent design behind it, the coherent and error-free arrangement, why it is so elegant, and it was not designed by coincidence.
It makes me wonder, what if one day we inject this Quranic semantic and thematic code into any AI models, LLM out there? How many benefits will it bring to humankind instead of the capitalist system? It might be the holiest HTML or CSS code ever programmed, with the most interactive JS interface.
Should it become a product, or service, or design thinking based on the teaching of the Quran? Or maybe, a way of life is better?
A coded program supposedly to perform a task thus provide a solution.
What if the solution code is already there, embedded, and what's left is to perform the task only. Isn't it easier to live with? What's your thought?
Disclaimer: I did not use ChatGPT to ideate and curate this article; it is my expressive observational writings and findings, so it might have some errors or misinterpretations, and I would humbly accept any corrections. And maybe collaborations in data analytics, next?