The Sheepshank Analogy

In seamanship, there are various shortening knots, in what I like to call the "shank family". These are used to take up slack in ropes, and only hold up under a certain amount of tension (too little or too much tension, and they collapse). Here are some of them...

The Catshank.

The Dogshank.

And arguably the most famous and basic, the Sheepshank, upon which the previous two were based. I know all this sounds deliciously violent (shanking various animals, really?!) but bear with me, a point is being made here.

The Sheepshank, loosely tied for illustration.

When the knot is tied, the rope is shortened. Once untied, we see that the rope is really a lot longer than we initially gave it credit for. And that leads us to...

Code editors!

Let's just use Sublime Text as an example. Sometimes the code can get really long, but Sublime Text (indeed, many other Code Editors) has this feature where you can visually compress the code.

A HTML example.

Before.

After.

A JavaScript example.

Before.

After.

Kind of like a Sheepshank! The code is still there, but the presentation hides it. And then it can be revealed again, easily.

Final words

I know this doesn't seem like much of an analogy. As analogies go, admittedly, it's pretty tame. But honestly, that was exactly what I was thinking of one day when I was expanding some code in Sublime Text - wow, this is kind of like untying a Sheepshank!

Shanks for reading,
T___T