Indeed. I’m also quite lost but it caught the eye of an acquaintance. Hopefully, we’ll have a discussion over tea about it.
To me, knitting seems to be such an intimate art where a person pours their skill and heart. When I wrap myself in the sweater that my grandmother knit for me in a city far away from home, I feel her presence and love in the patterns woven in the fabric, wondering what she’d have been thinking while knitting. “I was thinking about the latest mischief of our naughty goats and this boy frolicking along with them.” She’d answer whenever someone asked.
Programming and automating this takes away all that intimacy out of that art but I guess it is inevitable for the “engineering” minds. Maybe there’s a wonder to it just by exploring the possibilities, albeit through machines.
The thing is, early knitting machines were advertised by showing them competing against "mighty fishermen of many years" since it was deemed a necessary activity for fishing communities in winter.
View it as an extension of Jaquard looms and the punch cards used for them being the precursors of modern computers.
c.f., the Native American representations of Intel chip designs:
https://kottke.org/24/09/a-navajo-weaving-of-an-intel-pentiu...