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Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

In a series of experiments [chicagobooth.edu], researchers set out to discover the relationship between difficulty or “disfluency” and cognition [amasad.me]. They presented the same test to two groups, one in an easy to read (intuitive) format and the other in a difficult (disfluent) format. And in all the experiments they carried out, the disfluency group scored substantially higher. The theory behind this is that people will default to relying on the automatic, effortless, and primitive system for reasoning. But if things are counter-intuitive or harder to understand we switch to the deeper, deliberate and analytical mode of thinking.

I’ve been thinking about how this translates to programming. 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. Asking questions about best practices relative to the framework instead of programming our way out. The quintessential example of this is the Stack overflow questions for “how do I use jQuery to do X?” or the answers “use jQuery [plugin] to do X” where X could be anything from basic arithmetic to websockets.

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