Emacs’ Org Mode will improve your software engineering

Your brain is chaos

When working deep within a problem, often a bundle of ideas can pop into your brain at the same time. Each of these ideas has potential, but as soon as you explore one of these ideas, the context and momentum of the remaining thoughts start evaporating. Exploring an idea incurs a cost to the brain in that zaps in a whole new set of related ideas (damn you, associative machine). As time goes on, you realize that those initial ideas had some worth, but you no longer remember the ideas nor the thought that led to those ideas. Backtracking only works in a linear chain of transitions, perhaps with a branch here or there. Our deductive skills can only take us so far.

Though we have a huge capacity to store information and memory, it takes time and practice to save things there. Our working memory is small and will regularly drop things in order to keep up with wherever our focus and attention is moving. Instead of dropping things, we should save things and move on, like a Turing Machine.

Deterministic Finite Automata vs Turing Machines

DFAs and Turing Machines are identical except for one small difference — a Turing Machine has a tape of memory that it could read and write from. This has enormous implications for how powerful of a program it can implement, what sort of languages it can understand, the types of problems it can solve. The key is the ability to write things down.