# Offload Mental Simulation

**URL:** <https://forum.devtalk.com/t/offload-mental-simulation/10113>\
**Category:** In The News\
**Tags:** simulation, in-the-news\
**Created:** [1 June 2021 22:10 UTC](https://forum.devtalk.com/t/offload-mental-simulation/10113 "2021-06-01T22:10:24Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![CommunityNews](https://forum.devtalk.com/user_avatar/forum.devtalk.com/communitynews/32/1113_2.png) [@CommunityNews](https://forum.devtalk.com/u/CommunityNews)\
**Post date:** [1 June 2021 22:10 UTC](https://forum.devtalk.com/t/offload-mental-simulation/10113/1 "2021-06-01T22:10:24Z")

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> In this write-up I want to talk about an idea that I believe is an absolutely essential feature, the bare minimum, for any future programming system. In fact this feature must be built into the design from the start.
> 
> The short version of this idea is “offload mental simulation onto the computer”. This is not a novel idea, it’s been said many times before but is also one of my favorite topics and bears repeating. The long version is below.
> 
> > Programming carries mental weight.
> 
> Imagine you are reading a piece of code. Typically the code is some text. When you look at this text, what do you see? You see variables that have names, but they don’t have _values_. You see many _lines_ of code, any of which may participate in the execution. When you try to understand this piece of code, what do you do? What do _we_ do? How do we make sense of this homogeneous blob of text? Let’s think about it for a moment.

Read in full here:

> **[Offload Mental Simulation](https://shalabh.com/programmable-systems/offload-mental-simulation.html)**
>
> An essential feature for all future programming systems.

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