holding a program in your head, an article by Paul Graham.
One application of this is in doing testing, especially functional testing. When I write my Ruby on Rails tests, I think of things in terms of a story "Alice orders 3 extra nectaries, Betty orders those nectarines from the story, Charlene packs and delivers the nectaries".
This is because the human brain is uniquely suited to remember stories, we can keep huge storylines in our head, multiple interweaving storylines, because we evolved as social beings. So, it's a really great hack to use stories as ways to remember how our programs work, because our brains naturally work that way.
I'm going to try to think of more ways that we naturally think, and apply them to how we program.
