The only account of pair programming that made me spend time considering it was the story of Guy Steele pairing with Richard Stallman. My overall takeaway is to

The only account of pair programming that made me spend time considering it was the story of Guy Steele pairing with Richard Stallman. My overall takeaway is to treat pairing like mind melding, and if you can't get your minds to meld it's going to be disastrous. From http://oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch06.html http://oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch06.html : "We sat down one morning," recalls Steele. "I was at the keyboard, and he was at my elbow," says Steele. "He was perfectly willing to let me type, but he was also telling me what to type. The programming session lasted 10 hours. Throughout that entire time, Steele says, neither he nor Stallman took a break or made any small talk. By the end of the session, they had managed to hack the pretty print source code to just under 100 lines. "My fingers were on the keyboard the whole time," Steele recalls, "but it felt like both of our ideas were flowing onto the screen. He told me what to type, and I typed it." The length of the session revealed itself when Steele finally left the AI Lab. Standing outside the building at 545 Tech Square, he was surprised to find himself surrounded by nighttime darkness. As a programmer, Steele was used to marathon coding sessions. Still, something about this session was different. Working with Stallman had forced Steele to block out all external stimuli and focus his entire mental energies on the task at hand. Looking back, Steele says he found the Stallman mind-meld both exhilarating and scary at the same time. "My first thought afterward was: it was a great experience, very intense, and that I never wanted to do it again in my life."