The Programmer's Brain

The way the chess experiment applies to programming is that we should aim to split our code into chunks that make it more readable and easier to remember.

We can achieve this by using design patterns and comments. If a function’s name is enough to describe what it does, then a comment is not necessary. But sometimes a comment is needed to increase code readability.

Active elaboration is the process of thinking about similar things when learning a new concept. This helps strengthen the concept in memory.

In the context of programming, you can think about similar concepts in another programming language or if the concept fits a certain paradigm, framework, or domain.

Since code is similar to natural language, we can apply the same techniques that we use to understand text to understand a piece of code. A great way is to try to summarize the piece of code in words, which helps you understand it better and can serve as documentation.

It is pretty obvious that the names of variables matter. But oftentimes when we are in the middle of a hard problem, thinking about the name of a variable is too much for our cognitive capacity, so we just choose the first thing that comes to mind.

But we can increase our naming abilities while reviewing other people’s code. When you see one of their variables for the first time, take a few seconds to try to predict what it will be used for, and later evaluate how accurate its name was. Overtime, this should increase your intuition about good variable names.

A good name must fit the natural language the variables are defined in. For example, since in English you would say “the maximum number of points”, it makes more sense to choose the name max_points over points_max.

Also, the aim should be to use 2-4 words per variable (apart from the common 1 word names).

Since we can only hold a few things at once in our memory, this can slow us down while programming or while reading code. There are 2 strategies we can use.

1. Automatization: Practice a concept so much that it becomes second nature. If you’ve been programming for a while, you never think about the syntax of a for-loop, so that does not take almost any brain power while writing code.
2. Making models: a model is an abstraction you make to reduce your cognitive load, such as a diagram about a complicated codebase that helps you understand it better.