Mental Friction: Code’s Silent Killer

Do you recognize mental friction when you see it? Try reading this sentence out loud, saying the color of the word instead of what’s written.

A little tricky, no? You can do it, but it isn’t something that comes automatically — you have to stop and think about what you’re doing. Pay close attention to that feeling: what you’re doing requires effort. Can you imagine doing this quickly under duress with a manager breathing down your neck for deadline?

Let’s illustrate more extreme mental friction in the form of a Sudoku puzzle. These are already harder than reading a sentence, but here we introduce a hodgepodge of Arabic, Tibetan, Mandarin, and other scripts instead of “regular” numerals. Ready?

Good luck doing a multi-linqual Sudoku!

Can you appreciate how much more difficult this is than a regular Sudoku? At this point, you may have thrown up your hands and given up because this borders on the impossible. Can you feel your mental gears grinding to a halt?

What We’re Driving At

The point here is that too much friction will eventually make a task insurmountable. In an application’s code, mental friction accumulates. Minimizing friction…