[seanmcdirmid]

Yes. A real feedback loop is better than a mental one in your head. “Turn off your targeting computer and use the force, Luke” only works if you hone a lot of mental power into it (like Knuth), but it would have also discouraged a lot more people without that ability from programming at all.

In the past you had to be Hawkeye to program, now most of us just put on our Ironman suit and get on with it.

[mannykannot]

Nevertheless, the more complete and accurate your picture of what you are attempting to achieve, and where you are, is (at every level of abstraction), the fewer iterations it will take to get done - or the fewer bugs remaining after a given elapsed time.

It's like situational awareness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situation_awareness

[taeric]

The number one thing I try and build up for my teams is a mental picture of the entire system. It is amazing, to me, how much resistance I get to the idea.

[lostcolony]

The difference is other people.

Yes, if you're writing your -own- code, learning to envision what the system must do in your head first is very, very valuable.

When you're on a team, however, you -have- to compartmentalize. You have to create abstractions, black boxes, functionalities that you -could- dive into, but which you will accept only understanding at a contract (interface) level. The skill of envisioning the system is still useful, of course, but there will be black boxes.

The problem that causes, of course, is that every abstraction is leaky. You didn't know that calling this method also fired off this event, and so you -also- triggered that event. Or whatever. Hence, bugs and iteration. You also have to deal with -bad- interfaces, a bajillion parameters, or a parameter object that isn't intuitively obvious how to initialize, and you start having to iterate.

[mannykannot]

The problem is not just, or mainly, leaky abstractions - you can't make a system out of a collection of opaque abstractions. An important part of Knuth's genius is seeing deeply and clearly how they have to interact. Leaky abstractions are just one sort of problem that arises when this doesn't happen.

[seanmcdirmid]

If we want to go there, modern tooling allows you to forget some of the details you used to care about and focus more on other things, the tooling is rarely comprehensive and there will always be more to consider until the entire programming process is automated.

[mannykannot]

As modern tooling chips away at the accidental difficulties of software development, systems-level situational awareness becomes relatively more central to the process.

[commandlinefan]

Sort of. I've seen these productivity-enhancing tools used by people who have absolutely no clue what those tools are doing on their behalf produce some nightmares that sort of work sometimes. To get geekier with the analogy, a lot of people are like spiderman (the Tom Holland spiderman) who need to learn to use the powers of their suit before they're given access to the more powerful, more dangerous stuff.

[seanmcdirmid]

Put an untrained person in a bulldozer and there will be a lot of damage.

[tschwimmer]

>In the past you had to be Hawkeye to program, now most of us just put on our Ironman suit and get on with it.

This is an amazing metaphor, thank you for sharing!