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Comment by genmon | Hacker News Reader

Fascinating! Is the mental picture a side effect, or do you feel like it helps you reason about/manipulate the shape of the code?

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It helps in my case. Bash is all about text so you just see text being output and manipulated. Something like lisp is about lists and eval, so you mostly see those and equivalent expressions. With something like React, there’s this tree representation of state that is always on your mind.

It’s a more abstract representation than code. Not as fixed, but helps greatly with designing the next steps.

It seems to be a side effect. It doesn't help me in any obvious way. However, when it's happening then I've also ceased to be conscious of writing code. It just flows of its own volition.

I mean, I know I'm writing code, but I'm not consciously seeing, analyzing, formulating, or typing in code.

Edited to add: On reflection, the geometric vision does actually help me sometimes. When there's something wrong with the code I've written (be it a syntax or logical error), then the shapes react in a way that I'll call "dissonant". I pay attention to that signal and more consciously analyze what I've just done, to find the error.

The reason I ask: there's a story about a physicist who was so kinaesthetic in his thinking that somebody walked into his office to find him rolling around on the floor, trying to embody rotations from the point of view of a particular system or something...

I can't say that my own subjective feelings while coding are so useful! But I like to imagine that they're a meaningful contributor to my "taste" of what good/bad looks like

(Wish I could track down the reference)

I certainly don't get as deep as that physicist, but I do think I understand. When I'm working out a difficult logical/data/programmatic problem, then I use my hands in a similar way. I'll form hand shapes that in my mind represent geometric shapes and physically use my hands to "arrange" them in various ways until something "clicks" in my head. That "click" isn't the win of finding a solution, but more like a feeling that I have now grasped the true essence of the problem.

Essence of the problem is the right word. If we go with F. Brooks’ words, it’s like all the accidental complexity fade away and all that’s left is the idealistic view of how things should work. Then all that left is making it happens with code

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