If the day comes when it is possible to program computers in figure-ground rather than in lineal patterns, then there will be a means of coping with environments holistically rather than by fragmentation and quantitative analysis. Currently, computer programming is done sequentially in the left hemisphere style, that is, by dealing with figures minus their grounds. That limitation is a legacy of our phonetic alphabet which 2500 years ago gave us the power of dealing analytically with figure minus ground.