Nothing, I'm too busy swearing at the computer and threatening to break it in various ways, until I realise I was missing a semi-colon, or I've misspelled a keyword, or any number of other reasons that make me a bad programmer.
What do you visualize while programming?
81–90 of 176 posts
Re: What do you visualize while programming?
#82When I was first introduced to mental visualization, I thought I couldn't do it because I struggled to clearly picture something as simple as an apple - or any other familiar object - in my mind. But with practice, the images slowly became clearer and more stable. Through continued practice, I was able to visualize more complex things, like text and even music sheets - which is kind of a cheat code, because you can m…
It’s absolutely amenable to practice, I agree. I don’t personally see it as an improvement to a cognitive ability like learning a concept/practice is, but rather as training yourself to notice. I’ve been known to infuriate many a (web-)philosopher of mind by insisting that aphantasia isn’t nearly as common as it seems to be based on self reports; instead, I think many people don’t have the ingrained tendency to notice the images present in the corners of their mind. The shakiness tells me it’s almost definitely an accidentally-evolved capacity, so they’re probably the more normal ones! Or natural, at least.
I do think there’s a better way to practice than this tho:
the best way for me to improve a visualization is to research all the different tools and diagrams out there
Long story short: if you want to be a better programmer, contact your local felon today! Surely y’all are cooler than me and have cool felon friends…
Re: What do you visualize while programming?
#83I grew up as an electronic engineer designing actual computer hardware from the TTL level and beyond. Depending on what I'm programming, particularly with hardware interfaces and assembly or C, I think about the flow of the address and data lines as the code accesses chips and hardware interfaces. I see the address lines accessing a particular chip or port. I see the data going into and out of them.
Re: What do you visualize while programming?
#84I try to visualize the dependency graph for my variables. I figure OoO cores and optimizing compilers are good enough nowadays that, as long as I don’t really mess things up too badly, the computer should figure out how to extract that ilp.
Or, as a special case if I am writing an MPI code, I try to imagine what in the heck the slowest process is doing while everybody else waits at the barrier.
Re: What do you visualize while programming?
#85Nothing, I'm too busy swearing at the computer and threatening to break it in various ways, until I realise I was missing a semi-colon, or I've misspelled a keyword, or any number of other reasons that make me a bad programmer.
Just the other day I wasted 20 minutes tracking down a problem before caving and pasting some code into Claude, running a massive machine learning model trained by the foremost researchers in the AI industry, all so it could tell me I forgot semicolons in some CSS import lines.
I thought we were done with such goofiness in the days of auto-linters and syntax highlighting, but that’s why it was so tricky! The cause is always the last thing you think to check, after all…
Re: What do you visualize while programming?
#86When I was first introduced to mental visualization, I thought I couldn't do it because I struggled to clearly picture something as simple as an apple - or any other familiar object - in my mind. But with practice, the images slowly became clearer and more stable. Through continued practice, I was able to visualize more complex things, like text and even music sheets - which is kind of a cheat code, because you can m…
It’s absolutely amenable to practice, I agree. I don’t personally see it as an improvement to a cognitive ability like learning a concept/practice is, but rather as training yourself to notice . I’ve been known to infuriate many a (web-)philosopher of mind by insisting that aphantasia isn’t nearly as common as it seems to be based on self reports; instead, I think many people don’t have the ingrained tendency to noti…
For the simple country folk, a cow or horse pasture may have exactly what you are looking for.
I don't condone picking unknown fungus from fields...don't go die from picking the wrong thing.
Re: What do you visualize while programming?
#87I program with stack machines directly, so I visualize plates with numbers, names or things on them.
Re: What do you visualize while programming?
#88I'm a designer by trade, programming is largely a hobby for me. By default I see things as pictures in my mind, I always have.
When I read something and it doesn't make absolute sense to me, I need to learn more about the context so that I can 'see' the whole picture and how it fits together. This means I can take a while to grasp something, but once I do I seem to have a better understanding of it than my peers - likely because I have that wider context.
I also have a tendency and desire to simplify the complex - which I think is a combination of my need to learn the detail in order to build that picture in my mind - and with my design background I can represent that well in reality.
In my corporate day job it means that I can take complex stuff and make sense of it. And provided I've got support to be brutal in cutting down information, I can simplify it for others to grasp also.
Re: What do you visualize while programming?
#89When I was first introduced to mental visualization, I thought I couldn't do it because I struggled to clearly picture something as simple as an apple - or any other familiar object - in my mind. But with practice, the images slowly became clearer and more stable. Through continued practice, I was able to visualize more complex things, like text and even music sheets - which is kind of a cheat code, because you can m…
Thanks for sharing this! Do you have any additional resources that helped you achieving this? How long did it take you ? How much time did you invested ? If you can remember.
Unfortunately I never found much resources on how to practice it. I had this piano teacher who was fond of it and claimed being able to visualize the piano ( whole keyboard, how opened it was, the sheet stand, the texture of the keys etc. ), the sheet with its content for both hands, his hands, feeling his posture, feeling his feet on the pedals, feeling his hands move and hear the sound it should make.
I didn't achieve this level yet, but I'm 100% sure it's genuine, the guy could sing and play to prove he could see / hear / feel what he said.
Some learning process, applied to music were :
- Learning a tune with the music sheet away from the piano. The process is to imagine yourself playing it when you're looking at the music and try to hear it. Then, walk to the piano and try to visualize the sheet while playing it.
- The opposite : improvising and trying to visualize what you're improvising. At first you can just imagine the note on the staff, then enrich it with rhythm, putting it at the correct octave, add the left hand etc.. etc..
- Another one, which was quite crazy is that when you actually visualize a piece of music, you can try to play it in backward ( note and rhythm included ), or transpose it in your head and play it transposed.
As a matter of fact, this enabled me to learn some tunes in the train, and being able to play them with confidence the first time on the piano ( which is obvious because I had played them around 20x time in my head )
At this time I was playing around 6 to 8 hours a day, but I was able to actively work on that skill ~30 minutes a day, in the morning. I was unable to practice this when tired, or when I had drank alcohol the previous day, or when stressed. I also found that having a simple 10 minute meditation routine helped a lot focusing for this kind of work.
It took 1 month until I felt the first "improvements" and around 5/6 years until I could reliably use it. To this day I still thinks it helps me memorize faster and more reliably, and I feel like it gives me more ability to process stuff in my head. Consistency seem to be key for it to stick.
Re: What do you visualize while programming?
#90I picture clusters of information as they move through the computer. Sometimes they look like ships or motorcycles. :-) Usually, I don't visualize anything in particular. I use tools for visualization, but I prefer to think algebraically. If I work on a complicated system, programming to me feels like like moving through a landscape, with points of interest that I memorize or lay out spatially in a tool, and going th…
I would be interested in seeing someone working on an example problem and attempting to describe their inner thought process while doing it. Could be an interesting idea to compile a range of developers doing it with various day to day tasks they are already doing into a Youtube channel