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Comment by wcrichton | Hacker News Reader

I did my PhD at Stanford about the cognitive aspects of programming, including studies of cognitive load. This article uses pseudoscience to justify folk theories about programming. I would encourage readers to take everything with a grain of salt, and do not wave this article around as a "scientific" justification for anything.

I laid out my objections to the article last year when it first circulated: https://github.com/zakirullin/cognitive-load/issues/22

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Not knowledgeable enough to weigh in here, I just think it's very cool that 1) the authors blog was in public source control and 2) you made a polite github issue with your criticisms and 3) it wasn't deleted.

Congrats on your PhD at Stanford, but some humility has to be part of the scientific process for sure. It looks like a lot of folks called "programmers" agree with the points in the post. If it's such a common experience that should tell you something about the state of affairs.

It's a blog post on the internet. Of course one should take it with a grain of salt. The same applies to any peer-reviewed article on software engineering for example.

Just yesterday, I was watching this interview with Adam Frank [0] one of the parts that stood out was his saying why "Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience" (I can't find the exact snippet, but apparently he has a book with the same title.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhZAXXI83-4

I'm not saying that the conclusions in the article are false. As a programmer, I prefer composition to inheritance, too. I'm saying that the justifications are presented using a scientific term of art (cognitive load), but the scientific evidence regarding cognitive load isn't sufficient to justify these claims.

I don't think the readers really care about the scientific term in this context. It's a shared experience that we care about and implicitly understand. It's probably worth "researching" (in the scientific sense).

Thanks for sharing your knowledge and please ignore some of the other comments. HN is a place for "intellectual curiosity", but for some reason it always attracts its fair share of anti-intellectualism. Debating what cognitive load actually is is very relevant to the topic at hand.

FWIW, I can't speak to the science of it but as a programmer I even disagree with many of the conclusions in the article, such as that advanced language features are bad because they increase mental load.

Where was the word “scientific” mentioned in the article? I don’t think you were the target reader they had in mind when the author wrote this. I’ve been programming since 1986, and this article resonates with my experience. More abstractions, layers, and so on requires my brain to have to keep track of more shit which takes away from doing the work that brought me to work on that bit of code (bug fix, feature work, debugging, etc.)

We’re very proud of you and the hard work you did to earn your PhD, now please stop trotting it out.

The article is attempting to use a scientific term of art, "cognitive load", to justify claims about programming. Those claim cannot be justified given the existing evidence about cognitive load. As I explain in my linked response, I nonetheless agree with many of the claims, but they're best understood as folk theories than scientific theories.

And I don't think condescension will make this a productive discussion!

Maybe in your field the definition of cognitive load has a very specific, academic meaning. This article wasn’t meant for you.

My issue is that this article is trying to use cognitive load in its specific, academic meaning. It says:

> The average person can hold roughly four such chunks in working memory. Once the cognitive load reaches this threshold, it becomes much harder to understand things.

This is a paraphrase of the scientific meaning. "Intrinsic" and "extrinsic" cognitive load are also terms of art coined by John Sweller in his studies of working memory in education.

I agree the article isn't designed to be peer-reviewed science. And I agree the article has real insights that resonate with working developers. But I'm also a fan of honesty in scientific communication. When we say "vaccines prevent disease", that's based on both an enormous amount of data as well as a relatively precise theory of how vaccines work biologically. But if we say "composition reduces cognitive load", that's just based on personal experience. I think it's valuable to separate out the strength of the evidence for these claims.

You’re exhausting.

But, but he wrote a paper. He must be smart...

Please don't do this on HN.

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