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January 4, 2016 08:00 pm

Overcoming Intuition In Programming

An anonymous reader writes: Amjad Masad, a programmer who works at Facebook, has put up a post about intuition and programming. It's based on a series of experiments (PDF) into how the presentation of a problem affects the learning involved in solving it. Researchers found that if they made a test deliberately hard to understand, those taking the test would exhibit greater understanding after solving it than those who were presented with a more intuitive wording of the same problem. Masad discusses how the research applies to software engineering: "Programming is an intellectually challenging task, but luckily we invent tools to make it manageable. I find that up to a certain point, the intuitive and easy properties of a given language, framework, or library might start to have negative effects. From personal experience and from mentoring beginners I noticed that when using tools that allow us to reason within our intuition, anytime we're faced with some difficulty we feel that we've done something wrong. And although we might have the necessary skills to overcome the difficulty, we often start questioning and revising our work." He concludes, "Code reuse, libraries, sharing, and open-source are very important to software engineering, but we should be careful to not enable the belief that programming should be as easy as gluing things together."

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