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Holding a Program in One's Head (2007)

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.

Or to put it more dramatically, ordinary programmers working in typical office conditions never really understand the problems they're solving. This apparently random collection of annoying habits has a single explanation: the power of holding a program in one's head. Thanks to Sam Altman, David Greenspan, Aaron Iba, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Peter Norvig, Lisa Randall, Emmett Shear, Sergei Tsarev, and Stephen Wolfram for reading drafts of this.

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