The Mental Game of Python - Raymond Hettinger
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN recommends it as a Python talk with lessons that apply to any programming, especially chunking to manage complexity.
What it is
Raymond Hettinger's PyBay 2019 talk on the mental habits behind effective programming, drawn from coaching, teaching and StackOverflow. He covers problem decomposition, chunking, managing working memory and getting unstuck.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2019 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec Stormwalker · 2019-12 · on “Ask HN: Best Talks of 2019?”
My favorite talk of this year is Raymond Hettinger talking about mental gymnastics which helps you to structure your problems into ones that which you can solve. The mental game of Python: [this video]
Recommends meowface · 2020-09 · on “List of YouTube channels for improving web development and programming skills”
For programming, yes, especially if you're a beginner. But for more conceptual aspects of software engineering and system design, or tutorials on new technologies, videos can sometimes be useful. Here's a good recent one by Raymond Hettinger on making things easier for yourself when programming, such as ways of reducing how many things you'll need to keep in working memory at once. It actually does directly involve a lot of pure code so it's maybe not the best example of what I described, but it's mostly focused on cognition and is generalizable to programming in any language, or possibly doing any kind of demanding mental work in any field. "The Mental Game of Python" - [this video]
Recommends bionhoward · 2023-12 · on “Ask HN: Best resources on abstracting and dealing with complexity”
Great question, I personally recommend: 1. Simple Made Easy by Rich Hickey (video [LINK] ) 2. Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows (pdf [LINK] ) 3. Raymond Hettinger’s content about CHUNKING is classic for this (one example video [this video] ) 4. The classic tome on Abstraction is Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, by Doug Hofstadter ( [LINK] ) 5. Finally, I’ll cut myself at lucky number five by pointing you toward Jüergen (You-Again!) Schmidhuber’s fascinating webpage: [LINK] Honorable mention to Margaret Hamilton’s T-Maps and F-Maps. Use a hierarchical numbered outline. Zoom in and out of the fractal network. Remember your working memory holds seven (7) concepts, plus or minus two