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On Tuesday 12 October 2004 11:51 pm, Grant Sewell wrote:
Correct me if I'm wrong in this, Neil.
I think you've got this spot on, Grant. :-))
The way I see the situation is that regardless of whether Neil is sitting in the bath or sitting in the park thinking about ducks, he will still be thinking about code. With this in mind, the opportunity cost of coding to Neil is zero in both cases. True, sitting in the bath does preclude Neil from sitting in the park at the same time (or at least I hope it does :D), but neither activity would have a bearing on the opportunity cost of coding, which is nil.
Absolutely.
Another way to think of it, if you like, would be to regard coding as an involuntary action performed by lower function of the brain - like breathing. With practice you can indeed consciously prevent yourself from breathing for prolonged periods of time, but eventually something else takes control - be it a loss of consciousness or whatever - and then BAM! you're (hopefully) breathing again.
This ties in nicely with how problems can appear miraculously solved in the morning. Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleyev devised the periodic table following a moment of nocturnal "insight" http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994591 "In the experiments conducted by Wagner and his colleagues, volunteers tackled arithmetic problems and then took an eight-hour break. Those who slept during the break were twice as likely to realise that there was a hidden rule that substantially simplified the calculations. We think the strongest explanation is that sleep acts on the patterns created during the training, restructuring them to give insight to the hidden rule. Only one of the three groups of 22 volunteers was allowed to sleep during the interlude between training and re-testing. The other two groups remained awake, one during the day and one at night, to rule out "circadian" rhythm effects. The "sleepers" were more than twice as likely as the "wakers" to spot and exploit the short cut. "We recorded all the responses, and we could see very clearly the 'Eureka moment'," says Wagner." This is the kind of insight that is so useful in programming - I read about functions and libraries, I absorb the API as relaxation (bedtime reading if you will) and overnight the processing links together elements that allow me to solve a related problem.
Now, if we apply this concept of how the act of coding works, then coding itself bears no cost (opportunity or otherwise) as it is _always_ a concurrent activity. The actual fruits of this coding, however, may involve an opportunity cost as the physical action of typing in code and testing it may preclude Neil from having a bath or sitting in the park (let's not talk about Laptops yet, _please_!). Sitting in the bath, however, does not prevent Neil from breathing or coding.
10/10 Grant, lovely summary. The actual 'text entry' time is real relaxation - a kind of download that makes room for the next lot of processing. An essential management task - gives new meaning to the phrase 'take a load of your mind'. :-)) -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.codehelp.co.uk/ http://www.dclug.org.uk/ http://www.isbn.org.uk/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/isbnsearch/ http://www.biglumber.com/x/web?qs=0x8801094A28BCB3E3
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