[awild]

I try to encourage newcomers to refractor the code into a form they understand, fix the problem and then undo that refactoring as much as possible. If they actually come up with a better abstraction I'm up for it.

Refactoring will give them the chance to see what the actually moving parts of code are.

[samsquire]

I like your use of the words moving parts. Eventually code ends up looping over memory locations, copies, moves, adds, subtracts, multiplies, divides, reads, writes data or memory locations.

All the files and code on the way to get this to happen such as Classes, parameters, arguments, variables, functions, methods, closures, objects are ideas of the languages compiler to abstract the instruction stream.

Command line arguments, class constructors, URL query parameters, marshalling, JSON field names, method parameters, function arguments, HTTP headers, cookies, request objects, events are just complicated variations of passing data in the right shape. They are not the above list of "moving parts" or computation that is easy. In other words modern coding is just configuration.

I feel the complexity of modern code is a problem we created. And I feel there's something missing. It's hard to update code.

When I find the loop that does the thing, I feel I can understand the codebase such as the magic +1, -1 or the relationship of objects linked together in a data structure or the assignment to a list or array or variable.

"How does that get to here"