[greenyoda]

Software development seems to be something that's very different than what humans were "built" (evolved) for. During the millions of years over which our brains evolved, we had to be acutely aware of our environment so that we didn't get eaten while foraging for food. Driving might be similar to that: keeping your eye out for danger while your main goal is navigating your car to its destination. But that doesn't suggest to me a million-core machine -- it's more like a foreground process with a couple of lower-priority background processes. And adding just a few extra distractions to driving -- cell phones, texting, kids yelling in the back seat -- increases the probability of accidents, which suggests that our capacity for attention is quite limited.

However, software development calls for a very different kind of mental work, one we couldn't have evolved to be good at since our species only started doing it very recently: juggling multiple levels of abstractions in your head along with countless low-level details. That's so hard to do that trying to do it concurrently with other tasks severely degrades our ability to do it. Paul Graham wrote about this very eloquently in his essay "Holding a Program in One's Head" (http://paulgraham.com/head.html).