Safety Blanket

When programming, you have to predict what can go wrong and guard against it. Lots can go wrong, many classes of problems exist, and being conscious of them all and focused on proactively preventing them leaves little brain capacity for anything else. This is where tooling comes in. It takes over completely, or at least simplifies handling of, many classes of issues, lowering the cognitive overheard during programming.

For example, try coding for a day without syntax highlighting. You’ll likely observe that it’s doable, but far more tiring. This “more tiring” is the important bit here — it’s the manifestation of cognitive overheard — you get tired quicker from simply editing text, which means less fresh brain power is available to you for problem solving and other tasks.

So the purpose of tooling (in this context) is to guard you against predictable problems, freeing up your brain cycles for other purposes.

Next: Type Safety ⇒