Holding a Program in One's Head August 2007 A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it in his mind the way a mathematician holds a problem he's working on. Mathematicians don't answer questions by working them out on paper the way schoolchildren are taught to. That's particularly valuable at the start of a project, because initially the most important thing is to be able to change what you're doing. Your code is your understanding of the problem you're exploring. It's not easy to get a program into your head. Even the best programmers don't always have the whole program they're working on loaded into their heads. Avoid distractions. Even more striking are the number of officially sanctioned projects that manage to do all eight things wrong. It's not merely true that organizations dislike the idea of depending on individual genius, it's a tautology. Maybe we could define a new kind of organization that combined the efforts of individuals without requiring them to be interchangeable.
Poor, poor child. You have no idea. | Bryan Woods It's harder than you think. Right now you're probably underestimating the amount of frustration and discomfort you're about to experience, without realizing that by doing so you're creating all sorts of subtle barriers to obtaining a deep understanding of programming. The problem is that while you've uncovered a wonderful world that makes coding seem so approachable and fun, you're unknowingly making a giant leap by thinking it's somehow also easy. This might not seem like a big deal, but it's huge. Every single time (and this will happen constantly) you come across a concept that seems foreign or difficult or even just unintuitive, instead of thinking "It's OK. Programming is not always intuitive, it's inherently complex, and it's challenging. You're lucky to have stumbled across a very good first language, but you're likely to encounter developers who will tell you that this decision doesn't matter. You'll be surprised how much you'll eventually rely on memorization. And finally...