It really did get to the point, for me and a lot of programmers I knew at that time (I've been out of the programming business for about 15 years, now), where we would analyse real life situations - and talk about them to each other - in programming language terms.

Actually, I still do that sometimes - and more often than not, it helps me work out "what do I do now" or "how do I handle this" kinds of problems.