Comment Re:same as non-programming languages? (Score 2) 238
> I would say that this is similar to a chessmaster who has solved countless chess puzzles.
Chess masters recognize patterns in chess like they recognize faces. Show them a realistic pattern for a few seconds and they can remember it. Show them a random pattern and they won't remember it.
You can test this with programmers. Create a pattern, e.g. a common for loop:
for( int i = 0; i 10; i++ )
{
print i;
}
Show this to a person for a couple of seconds and ask them to rewrite it out from their memory. If they can do it, they are more likely experienced. If they can't, they are more likely not experienced. To make the test more fool proof, you should also create a random pattern from those characters and test if the person can remember that. As some people actually have a very good memory even if they are not programmers.