Interacting with physical processes improves your mental model. In *Broad Band* (a magisterial history of women in computing), Claire Evans talks about how the first programmers were women who did the "unskilled" labor of physically cabling components together, developing powerful Fingerspitzengefühl, with such high-fidelity, trans-abstraction mental models of the machines' operations that they became the world's best programmers and debuggers:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/13/data-protection-without-monopoly/#broad-band
18/
Cory Doctorow
npub1yx…75qvv
2026-07-03 09:08:25 UTC
in reply to nevent1q…egz5
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