(Making a separate follow-up reply here) I've now read the whole thing. It's delightful! Thank you. You should make a separate HN post out of it. It might attr

(Making a separate follow-up reply here) I've now read the whole thing. It's delightful! Thank you. You should make a separate HN post out of it. It might attract interesting discussion, though that's mostly the luck of the draw. What she's saying does have parallels in software. Being able to know why something is designed or coded the way it is is critical to good software work. That for me is the connection. I consult this kind of intuition all the time. For example, I had a massive breakthrough yesterday - something I've been banging my head over for months suddenly yielded to a simple solution - but the most compelling thing was that it was a moral solution in Cheng's sense: I can look at it and see not just that it works but why. Finding this solution brought a tremendous feeling of relief. But without the "moral" aspect, I wouldn't have felt nearly as good; I'd have seen the tests passing and things appearing to be correct, but there would have been less relief and more of the uneasy sense that it might fall apart with the next test case. The material about social proof is reminiscent of De Millo, Lipton, and Perlis on the Limits of Formal Methods, which is also worth reading: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3554556 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3554556. Also, one of the most delightful things in the (Cheng) piece is the quote from Hume, showing that as so often, Hume got there before everybody else and said it best. I still don't think it has the least thing to do with design patterns, though :)