Comment by nomel
4 days ago
> The reason abstractions are so valuable is that they allow for compression of something into working memory.
I wonder if people with smaller working memory necessarily have more organized mental models, to facilitate the compression. People with autism [1] and ADHD [2] tend to have decreased working memory. Are their mental models more "optimized" for compression?
...or do they just perform worse on these memory-intensive tasks? The latter seems more likely to be common.
But the uncommon case is interesting though. Some deficiencies might lead to a certain kind of problem-solving that occasionally produces exceptionally useful solutions. Isn't that why we valorize laziness in programmers?
The overrepresentation of autism spectrum in programmers is interesting. Maybe the extreme hierarchy of code fits well.