I think about this question a lot. I think the article (and Borges) touch on the core issue: abstraction. I find that many of my employees find it very easy to

I think about this question a lot. I think the article (and Borges) touch on the core issue: abstraction. I find that many of my employees find it very easy to program based on their lived experience programming similar tasks, but hard to take a step back and answer the question "What is the appropriate generalization of what I am doing right now?" My hypothesis these days is that a strong autobiographical memory has little to do with programming. Rather, a good memory for semantic information as well as the ability to creatively rotate one's perspective seem to be much more important.