The mental part of planning a synthesis is a lot like programming. The differences are: parts (i.e. reactions) are less interchangeable, and when you actually make the stuff, you get diminishing returns, "recompile" is not as trivial a task.
Synthetic biology is a lot closer, since you can copy DNA at will, and while editing is not as simple as spinning up an instance of vi, "recompile" is a whole heck of a lot easier.
I didn't take the organic chem lab course, because I had a bad time in lab I. The o-chem lab might have been better, since it was supposed to be more qualitative and less quantitative, so maybe it would have been less susceptible to shaky titration hands... but I didn't want to chance it. The analogy to programming only goes so far, but the differences were enjoyable to me, since I had plenty of exposure to real programming.
The mental part of planning a synthesis is a lot like programming. The differences are: parts (i.e. reactions) are less interchangeable, and when you actually make the stuff, you get diminishing returns, "recompile" is not as trivial a task.
Synthetic biology is a lot closer, since you can copy DNA at will, and while editing is not as simple as spinning up an instance of vi, "recompile" is a whole heck of a lot easier.