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Cognitive load is what matters

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Re: Cognitive load is what matters

#51

Post by dsego »

api wrote: post #20
Buttons840 wrote: post #4

I'm probably one of the "smart developers" with quirks. I try to build abstractions. I'm both bothered and intrigued by the industry returning to, what I call, "pile-of-if-statements architecture". It's really easy to think it's simple, and it's really easy to think you understand, and it's really easy to close your assigned Jira tickets; so I understand why people like it. People get assigned a task, they look aroun…

A pile of if statements is a direct model of business deal making, which is literally a pile of if statements. Sales contracts with weird conditions and odd packaging and contingencies? Pile of if statements. The other great model for business logic is a spreadsheet, which is well modeled by SQL which is a superset of spreadsheet functionality. So piles of if’s and SQL. Yeah. Elegant functional or OOP models are usua…

You usually don't want your code logic to stray from the mental or domain model of business stakeholders. Usually when my code makes assumptions to unify things or make elegant hierarchies, I find myself in a very bad place when stakeholders later make decisions that flip everything and make all my assumptions in the code base structure fall apart.

Re: Cognitive load is what matters

#52

Post by djtango »

Buttons840 wrote: post #4

I'm probably one of the "smart developers" with quirks. I try to build abstractions. I'm both bothered and intrigued by the industry returning to, what I call, "pile-of-if-statements architecture". It's really easy to think it's simple, and it's really easy to think you understand, and it's really easy to close your assigned Jira tickets; so I understand why people like it. People get assigned a task, they look aroun…

IMO you touch on the real heart of the issue at the end - the real world and business is messy and really _is_ just a pile of if statements.

When the problem itself is technical or can be generalised then abstractions can eliminate the need for 1000s of if-statement developers but if the domain itself is messy and poorly specified then the only ways abstractions (and tooling) can help is to bake in flexibility, because contradiction might be a feature not a bug...

Re: Cognitive load is what matters

#53

Post by dsego »

Buttons840 wrote: post #19

It's been said: "Document the why , not the what ." I have a hard time separating the why and the what so I document both. The biggest offender of "documenting the what" is: x = 4 // assign 4 to x Yeah, don't do that. Don't mix a lot of comments into the code. It makes it ugly to read, and the context switching between code and comments is hard. Instead do something like: // I'm going to do // a thing. The code // do…

> x = 4 // assign 4 to x

Ah, the chat gpt style of comments.

> Instead do something like:

The only negative is that there is a chance the comment becomes stale and not in sync with the code. Other coders should be careful to update the comment if they touch the code.

Re: Cognitive load is what matters

#54

Post by [deleted] »

edtechdev wrote: post #46

Cognitive load isn't a valid or useful concept: https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/cognitive-load-th... https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00131857.2024.2... There are separate contexts involved here: the coder, the compiler, the runtime, a person trying to understand the code (context of this article), etc. What's better for one context may not be better for another, and programming languages favor…

[deleted]

Re: Cognitive load is what matters

#55

Post by DonHopkins »

noen wrote: post #18

This article reminds me of my early days at Microsoft. I spent 8 years in the Developer Division (DevDiv). Microsoft had three personas for software engineers that were eventually retired for a much more complex persona framework called people in context (the irony in relation to this article isn’t lost on me). But those original personas still stick with me and have been incredibly valuable in my career to understan…

Is Microsoft so Balkanized that they have a Developer Division, Developer Multiplication, Developer Addition, and Developer Subtraction (where you get transferred to before they fire you)?

Re: Cognitive load is what matters

#56

Post by rowanG077 »

It's always interesting that many people who push the cognitive load argument also push for simpler languages. To me once I have learned a language well the features it has don't add to the cognitive load. they become basically second nature. It even has a great benefit, many things that are explicit in simple languages because there is no language support fall away in more complex languages. So more complex languages reduce cognitive load, at least for me.

Re: Cognitive load is what matters

#58

Post by figassis »

Buttons840 wrote: post #4

I'm probably one of the "smart developers" with quirks. I try to build abstractions. I'm both bothered and intrigued by the industry returning to, what I call, "pile-of-if-statements architecture". It's really easy to think it's simple, and it's really easy to think you understand, and it's really easy to close your assigned Jira tickets; so I understand why people like it. People get assigned a task, they look aroun…

Abstractions are ok, SomethingFactories are stupid. If your code is more abstractions than actual logic and you need logic to manage the abstractions (eg. FactoryFactories, 2+ inheritance levels), you should rethink your strategy.

Re: Cognitive load is what matters

#59

Post by dsego »

chrisweekly wrote: post #13

Brilliant essay. Bookmarked for future reference.

I would also recommend A Philosophy of Software Design if you haven't read it, a very short and brilliant read with a similar approach.

There is also a discussion between the author of Clean Code and APOSD:

https://github.com/johnousterhout/aposd-vs-clean-code

Re: Cognitive load is what matters

#60

Post by DarkNova6 »

Buttons840 wrote: post #4

I'm probably one of the "smart developers" with quirks. I try to build abstractions. I'm both bothered and intrigued by the industry returning to, what I call, "pile-of-if-statements architecture". It's really easy to think it's simple, and it's really easy to think you understand, and it's really easy to close your assigned Jira tickets; so I understand why people like it. People get assigned a task, they look aroun…

Perhaps expressing intend and describing the underlying domain carries more value than pure “abstraction”.
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