The most mentally straining part of programming (for me) is focusing down on the detail of a line of code while maintaining perspective on why we are doing this at all. When a particular implementation gets hard, should I keep going? back up a step and redesign? or back way up and solve the problem in a different way?
Understanding the full “why” of what I’m doing helps me make decisions from naming to error handling to library and tool integrations. But it’s hard. It takes time to shift my brain from the detail level to the business level and back. (This is one way pairing helps.)
That zooming in and out is tough, and it’s essential. This morning I learned that it is also essential in love. Maria Popova quotes poets and philosophers on how love requires understanding, then:
We might feel that such an understanding calls for crouching closer and closer to its subject, be it self or other, in order to examine it with narrow focus and shallow depth of field, but this is a misleading intuition — the understanding of love is an expansive understanding, requiring us to zoom out of our habitual solipsism so as to regard ourselves and the object of our love from a great distance against the backdrop of universal life.
Maria Popova, Brain Pickings
Abeba Birhane, cognitive scientist, points out that Western culture is great at picking things apart, breaking problems up to their smallest possible components. She quotes Prigogine and Stenges: “We are so good at it. So good, we often forget to put the pieces back together again.”
She also sees this problem in software. “We forgot why we are doing it, What does this little component have to do with the big picture?” (video)
Software, love, everywhere. Juarrero brings this together when she promotes hermeneutics as the way to understand complex systems. Hermeneutics means interpretation, finding meaning, especially of language. (Canonical example: Jews studying the torah, every word in excruciating detail, in the context of the person who wrote it, in the context of their place and time and relations.) Hermeneutics emphasizes zooming in and out from the specific words to the work as a whole, and then back. We can’t understand the details outside the broader purpose, and the purpose is revealed by all the details.
This is the approach that can get us good software. (Not just clean code, actual good software.) I recommend this 4-minute definition of hermeneutics; it’s super dense and taught me some things this morning. Who knows, it might help your love life too.