In the book "The Pragmatic Programmer" they refer to this as "rubber ducking". The origin of the term was from a particular programmer who kept a rubber duck s

In the book "The Pragmatic Programmer" they refer to this as "rubber ducking". The origin of the term was from a particular programmer who kept a rubber duck sitting near his computer (I believe on his monitor, I don't have the book handy right now). When questioned about why the duck was there, he said that when he got stuck on a problem, he would explain the problem to the rubber duck (full well knowing that the duck was not going to respond :-D ). The purpose of having the duck was just to have a target to explain the problem to, knowing that the act of explaining the problem would often lead him to the solution. There's a wiki article about it here: http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?RubberDucking http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?RubberDucking