Old looms could make patterns and it's considered by many that the way to "encode" those different patterns was actually an early of programming.

There was a talk at a Linux conference a while back relating knitting to programming and I’ve yet to watch it because the audio on YT wasn’t great but it’s on my list.

I find knitting very soothing, and it also scratches the same itch as programming.

See also, beach pebbles.