Software Design X-Rays

Is Software Too Hard?

I spent six years of my career studying psychology at the university. During those years I also worked as a software consultant, and the single most common question I got from the people I worked with was why it’s so hard to write good code. This is arguably the wrong question because the more I learned about cognitive psychology, the more surprised I got that we’re able to code at all. Given all the cognitive bottlenecks and biases of the brain—such as our imperfect memory, restricted attention span, and limited multitasking abilities—coding should be too hard for us. The human brain didn’t evolve to program.

Of course, even if programming should be too hard for us, we do it anyway. We pull this off because we humans ...