3 ms·
“Rule of six” is generally interesting - I came upon the concept when reading the book “Nightfall” by Isaac Asimov as a kid. There’s a line in the book about th
by rzimmerman 4y ago
“Rule of six” is generally interesting - I came upon the concept when reading the book “Nightfall” by Isaac Asimov as a kid. There’s a line in the book about the number of stars in the sky, and how people can’t really grasp numbers more than 5-10. It got me thinking about trying to visualize a set of 3, 4, or 5 distinct objects without splitting them into groups. I genuinely can’t do it for more than 5 or 6 of something.
I also remember reading about a study where chess masters and non-experts were asked to memorize chess boards. Average people could only remember 5-7 piece locations where chess masters could remember the entire board. But when the piece layout was random (rather than from real chess matches) the experts weren’t much better than the non-experts. It’s speaks to the abstractions our brain creates to deal with limited working memory.
That cumbersome line of python is a good example. As an experienced python person, I immediately found myself giving names to the chunks to understand it.
Overall very good advice. Your code should explain the steps it takes to solve a problem (or in a more functional language, explain the solution), not be as terse and clever as possible. Keystrokes are cheap; thinking is expensive.