When we make a judgment, we are saying that one thing has a larger value than another. We have a value function in our brains that takes two arguments and returns whether the first is less than, equal to, or greater than the other. As cruel or as crazy as it may sound, that function can take any two things and compare them; we have to make decisions like Value(CoolJob, CloseToFamily) all the time.

A novice in the ways of the Web came upon a Master, and implored him, "Sir, will you please teach me the ways of the Web and take me on as a student? For I am much in need of the knowledge the Web contains." The Master agreed, and the novice began his training. Within hours, he came upon a website containing thousands of strange cat pictures. The novice called over the Master and said, "

Many fans of Science Fiction refuse to acknowledge any Dune books not written by Frank Herbert, despite this ending the series on a massive cliffhanger. They choose to follow Muad'Dib's philosophy, instead: "Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife -- chopping off what's incomplete and saying: 'Now, it's complete because it's ended here.'" - DisContinuity, TVTropes Wiki

What is programming? When you first start programming, the answer is painfully obvious: Programming is making the computer do what you want. Duh, right? However, if you have any aptitude for it at all, you will rapidly get to the point where making the computer do what you want really isn't that hard. Oh, you may be betrayed by your environment, your libraries, even your hardware sometimes, and you never get to the point where you are immune to the multi-day debugging sessions, but in general, getting the computer to do what you want ceases to be a challenge.

So if I want to absorb something complicated quickly - or even, when I need to do so, slowly - the efficient way to help me is to write it out first. When you think of it, the time compression between reading and writing is quite astonishing: the thriller that lasts for half a plane journey will have taken half a year to write..... ... Just for an experiment, try listening to the television news while not watching the pictures.

The core point of the entire Programming Wisdom blogbook.

Expanding the points made in Compression and Compression in Languages up to the Methodology level, and beyond.

Wherein the point I was setting up in Compression is made.

Below the fold, a discussion about compression, using this as a clear example of a principle I intend to relate to other programming principles, and indeed engineering principles in general.

The unifying principle of this book is: Everything costs something. Everything worth talking about has benefits. Nothing is free; nothing has infinite value. This sounds very simple and unobjectionable, but experience shows people have a hard time putting it into practice and realizing how pervasive the principle is.