Neocortex based development

Questions & Help General Questions
1

Guys, can you please comment my rant.

I’ve several points that burn me inside and I still can’t find good enough approaches to resolve them.
I call one of these points - “You live in a house, not in a city” - you can name it “bad scope all the time”.

Every time I try to solve something I feel the world (tools) is trying to ruin my solution.
For instance, I’ve never developed a whole lib at once. At any moment my attention is focused on a very particular task/function. And I switch between tasks all the time. Go up and down on ladder of abstraction.

I mean I can’t have 20KLOC in my head, but filesystem and cheap/easy scrolling made all these endless lists of defs/implementations (aka source files).

My dream workflow will have a tool than will show me at any moment just a little chunk of “a project” and dim/hide everything else.
Lighttable was a revelation, withEve was a new hope.

Guys, how do force your tools to support neocortex based development?

2

Not a magic solution, but splitting the problems into smaller ones and dedicating one file/namespace per problem then using the REPL and tests to focus on one problem could help. For libraries I find clojure spec and test.check extremely useful.

3

Not sure if that’s what you meant, but Emacs has this concept of narrow and widen. So you can narrow to a function, or a region (aka selection in Emacs parlance), and it will hide everything else except the current function or region. You can then widen to get the rest back. It allows you to focus on one function or one region at a time, distraction free.

4