This is a story-telling technique not specific to writing code. An advance practitioner will trash a technique every beginner must learn to outline a higher-lev

This is a story-telling technique not specific to writing code. An advance practitioner will trash a technique every beginner must learn to outline a higher-level mastery. It's a discourse that happens in everything: climbing, skiing, fishing, name it. It makes for an impressive story and establishes the speaker as a jedi master. It's also mostly bollock. Every one will have epiphanies. I sometimes work on a problem for a while, go to the loo and have the solution come up. It's the well-known phenomenon of stepping away for a while and letting teh brain unfocus from the details. Yes, it works when the problem was something fundamental or architectural. It rarely does when the problem was using the wrong variable, or a test that was inverted. These are easier to find with traces or a debugger. But dissing the low-level practices is so much better at getting that alpha status...