Cognitive load is what matters

Love it. Make code accessibility a first-class citizen. Turn the rule books and their principles into guidelines. A smart coder knows to follow rules. A master knows code is meant to be read and develops contextual awareness for when and why to break a rule, or augment it, as the case may be. So, reintroduce judgment and critical thinking in your coding practice. Develop an intuitive feel for the cognitive costs and trade-offs of your decisions. Whether you choose to duplicate or abstract, think of the next person (who sometimes is you in six months).

For those asking why author doesn't come up with their own new rules that can then be followed, this would just be trading a problem for the same problem. Absentmindedly following rules. Writing accessible code, past a few basic guidelines, becomes tacit knowledge. If you write and read code, you'll learn to love some and hate some. You'll also develop a feel for heavy handedness. Author said it best:

> It's not imagined, it's there and we can feel it.

We can feel it. Yes, having to make decisions while coding is an uncomfortable freedom. It requires you to be present. But you can get used to it if you try.

Thanks a lot! You've nailed it :)

> Make code accessibility a first-class citizen.

This is a good article but the main thing that bugs me about it is that the author completely disregards germane overhead.

Germane overhead is about recognition and practice and, at scale, it matters just as much.

Intrinsic and extraneous overhead is about the information itself and how it’s presented.

Germane overhead is about the receiver so in order to make code accessibility a first-class citizen you can’t ignore it.

This is correct. To delve into a topic about cognitive load without talking about germane overhead disqualifies this article (i.e. similar to extraneous overhead in terms of effort but germane overhead is beneficial. Because it helps the coder's reading ability.)

The examples are good but every reader must not have the takeaway that every effortful code is bad (e.g. haskell is extremely hard to read at first but every developer swears it has very high intrinsic cognitive load)

You might have opened the article thinking that it was going to be a discussion on cognitive load theory in general. It's not and I don't believe it needed to be for its purpose, since it's been well framed: code. Intrinsic, extraneous, germane loads? Why talk in abstract? The field of professional programming is an exemplar that evidences all those concepts. We pretty much live the theory. Programming is inherently complicated, we know how/why. We tend to needlessly add to the complexity, we know how/why. We are also notoriously ignorant, oblivious even, of our minds' true limitations and have strange beliefs regarding our abilities. Check, check, and check. Article can just speak plainly. "Don't make complicated things more complicated than they need to be. You're only human".