programming from brain perspective

As I talked during YAPC::EU with fellow Perl 6 fanboy mäsak about his (GOTO considered awesome) and mine (Perl 6 operators) recent talk I just summarized something I said and something he said and its just one little thought you might find nice too: Because normally as programmers we see it as as best practice from engineering point and so called best practices to have small manageable units (blocks, sub's classes,) and link them together as loosely as possible.

Reusage, readability ... you heard the arguments - and they are true, by a rule of thumb. But why? As Perl people we also a little linguistic angle from Larry which comes to similar conclusions but I also did a bit reading into neurology and and there is indeed something like different hemispheres of the brain, even they are not as fixed as some say.

The left brain, which enables language (spoken and written, and thought about) but the right brain is good at seeing the whole picture at once. We need the ladder for any software project with size. Tricky thing is - right brain doesn't understand language at all and left brain (rational mind) is very weak at handling complexity or quantities of data, it rather prefers to bisect things into linear orderings. But its good at speculating at the what if, like running your virtual Perl interpreter inside your brain.

So you see its just natural to have small units we can think deeply about and understand them. And on other hand having complex systems by combining these parts just sorta knowing, felt like knowing what parts do but seeing the whole picture at once and how they interact.

(damasio says: emotions [not feelings - which are body reactions] are right brains way to organize information - without emotion we forget. These methods to memorize random numbers by mentalists or how you remember secure passwords are nothing but attaching emotion to some data blob.)

Of course i will se how I can utilize that even more effective in CP. Wee in my next posts.

Thanks for reading.

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