Ask HN: I'm 40 and feel my mental ability declining. Programming seems harder.

I would doubt the code first. If it is built on layers of indirection that's a sign there's an abstraction that's not being made which could simplify that code. We write code first, and foremost, for other humans to understand. If it's too hard to understand due to all the indirection that's a problem with the way the code is written, not you!

A big difference I find between myself as an engineer now (40s) vs myself in my 20s is that I have the education, experience, and wisdom to appreciate elegance and simplicity. When I was younger I would throw myself at a problem and keep adding code until the program did what I wanted. I could only imagine what people meant by "elegance," and "simplicity." These days I rely more on mathematical reasoning and think about the problem before I start writing code. I feel as though I can finally see that simplicity is not effortless.

Barring very specific health complications, cognitive decline is not a major factor for most people in their 40s.

Most programmers are fooling themselves if they think they can keep the state of more than a handful of variables in their head and detect errors or understand the entire control flow. That's a code smell, a problem, something that should be addressed. After all: if you can't understand the code, and the next person has difficulty as well -- if you need to make a change to it, how do you know that the change you've made is correct? Do you know that this code does what it's supposed to?

> lifting weights.

In this recent survey of nootropics [1], weightlifting was better than dozens of chemicals. In fact, it was third only to Dexedrine and Adderall. It scored better than Ritalin! And its variance is tighter than most substances, meaning it's one of the most likely means to improve results for anyone who takes it on.

Personally, I agree. After covid sapped some of my energy, it took about 2-3 months to get back to my average gym sessions and now I feel so much better. Happier, tougher, etc. When I am in shape, the geometry of the world around me changes. A distance or effort I might consider looks, feels, and is more in reach after a few weeks of rows, lunges, pushups, hanging, swinging, light cardio, biking, etc.

[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/link-troof-on-nootropi...

Do you take notes on paper? If not now's the time to start, get you a legal pad and jot down some notes like the Where, What, When, Why, and How.

We only have so much working memory, life at times can take up much of it. No need to try to force our brains to do so much when you can do your thinking on the paper.

Paper notes are also great for being able to get up and come back to a subject. You can get up at any point and come back with a save state of what you were doing, and how you got there.

I’m a “biological optimist” and think a lot of what we consider “bad” can be and often is at least somewhat adaptive. Even things like aging and death; there are ways to age and die adaptively to give room to the next generation, to allow societal renewal/avoid sclerosis, etc. My understanding is that aging is thought to be in part an evolutionary adaptation against cancer, and a kind of pattern of creative destruction we see all over the place in both nature and society. There are also maladaptive tragic ways to age without remembering/learning how to live in your context, and maladaptive things like premature aging, disease, etc.

All adaptation is contextual. This picture is probably familiar to a lot of people, and is a perfect illustration of what I’m talking about: https://www.boredpanda.com/athlete-body-types-comparison-how...

There is no universal “better”. At any age, in any environment, in any physical condition, there are contextually appropriate optimums, and always two categories of direction: 1) using whatever tools are at your disposal to adapt as much as you can while accepting (and testing) limitations 2) ignoring what tools you do and don’t have and either giving up or trying to get the world to adapt to you.

The first direction is always better.

My biggest pain point with programming is I am constantly rebuilding mental models of software projects.

I think its a problem with the way we write software. I think all code we write should be visualizable at different levels of granularity, and should be able to show data flowing through it inline. We have all these principles about writing good software such as it should be testable, performant, self-documenting...but I would argue the most important thing is that it should be visualizable! And easily debuggable.

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I would suggest using a visual debugger and an IDE with static call hierarchy features (sometimes called find usages or find all references).

You should think about how you would build it from scratch. Then fit the existing API to your own mental model of how you would build it. Then it will be easier to understand why people did things a certain way. Many times I will see someone's code and wonder why they came up with such a complicated abstraction layer, but then when you build it yourself you see how it comes very naturally. The problem is for most projects you are looking at the end result of someone else's journey of building from scratch and refactoring along the way as needed.