Discussion
Old, and imho not very good, models of programming ability were pretty strongly informed by the cognitive science backgrounds of the few people who worked on them. E.g., the argument that a strong working memory and trained better 'chunking' might lead to large indiv diffs in programming
@grimalkina I remember taking a test for CS ability and totally flunking it.
The main reason I failed was that for many of the multiple-choice questions I could make valid arguments for more than one choice - so had to try and guess what the question-setter was trying to get me to pick.
It was deeply frustrating as there was nobody to ask clarifying questions.
Turns out that the ability to find logical flaws is rather useful for programming! Also, asking clarifying questions is critical!
This is laughably simplistic when it comes to modern programming, and there are approximately a million other things we can also care about when it comes to people learning and working.
So many myths about the skills of programming derive from this obsession with (human) memory
It's pretty interesting to think about how these attributes may have mattered because of the constraints of the day, but the ways we've carried them forward in stereotypes is just, remarkable
I keep trying to wrap my mind around it because it's such a chain of claims that are slightly warped referencing other claims that weren't actually the thing that person said....loads of noise. Very frustrating.
Another thing I notice is that things that are probably generally true if you selected ANY cognitive task, for any group of people, are taken to represent programming ability in a unique way just because a study was done solely with programmers.
So few questions about what might be a general trend across pretty much all forms of complex work (e.g., working memory could also matter for managing a restaurant), and assumption that finding in a population of programmers = "unique to programming"
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