Fred Brooks said it best 50 years ago > The programmer builds from pure thought-stuff: concepts and very flexible representations thereof. Because the medium i

Fred Brooks said it best 50 years ago > The programmer builds from pure thought-stuff: concepts and very flexible representations thereof. Because the medium is tractable, we expect few difficulties in implementation; hence our pervasive optimism. Because our ideas are faulty, we have bugs; hence our optimism is unjustified. Humans just have bad intuitions for this problem space, so you have to be consciously empirical; externalize decision factors, track outcomes, articulate hypotheses and be honest.