Comment by cycomanic
3 days ago
> Programmers (and I'm including myself here) often go to great lengths to not think, to the point of working (with or without a coding assistant) for hours in the hope of avoiding one hour of thinking. What's the saying? "An hour of debugging/programming can save you minutes of thinking," or something like that. In the end, we usually find that we need to do the thinking after all.
This is such a great observation. I'm not quite sure why this is. I'm not a programmer, but a signal-processing/system engineer/researcher. The weird thing seems that it's the process of programming that causes the "not-thinking" behaviour, e.g. when I program a simulation and I find that I must have a sign error somewhere in my implementation (sometimes you can see this from the results), I end up switching every possible sign around instead of taking a pen and pencil and comparing theory and implementation, if I do other work, e.g. theory, that's not the case. I suspect we try to avoid the cost of the context switch and try to stay in the "programming-flow".
This is your brain trying conserve your energy/time by recollecting/brute-forcing/following known patterns, instead of diving into unknown. Otherwise known as „being lazy” / procrastinating.
There is an illusion that the error is tiny, and its nature is obvious, so it could be fixed by an instant, effortless tweak. Sometimes it is so (when the compiler complains about a forgotten semicolon), sometimes it may be arbitrarily deeply wrong (even it manifests just as a reversed sign).