Holding a Program in One's Head (2007)
It's actually an indictment of our programming tools that they require one to hold so much of the design context in one's head. If they were better (more expressive, easier to interact with) they would help to solve the problems rather than require superhuman feats of endurance.<p>pg does mention that succinct programming languages help, which is true, but they don't go nearly as far as they could.  Like him, I use Lisp for that very reason, but Common Lisp is 30 years old -- why hasn't the state of the art advanced since then? It's really quite shameful.