Eric S. Raymond believes that CS IQ — that is, programming talent — is largely the ability to form what philosophers call generative models:
They can reason forward about how causal effects will ripple through the rest of the model when the state of some part of it changes. They can also reason backward about what sort of state change would be required to produce a specified effect.
If you’ve worked with bad programmers, you know they lack any such talent. This is old news though.
What caught my eye was a comment from one Saltation. He shares the story Woz told, of how he was forced to learn and do all his early designs in his head, because he didn’t have the physical kit, so he spent an inordinate amount of time optimizing his designs, rather than soldering them together. He made a point to get his designs down to the absolute minimum number of parts — which brings us to Saltation’s pilot father’s favorite quote, an old maxim from Harry Hawker:
Simplify — and add lightness!