Another problem with the analogy is that you can meaningfully make a $0.01 payment on your debt. You can pick any arbitrary percentage of your debt and pay it off right now, if you have the money to do so. Programming tasks are not only more (unpredictably) quantized than that, they're usually Sisyphean: if you do a little but don't finish, you've wasted the time you spent because the boulder rolls back down as soon as you stop pushing.