Steve Luscher, a ReactJS guru and enthusiast outside of Facebook who was subsequently hired by Facebook, has talked about the Big-Coffee Notation in a video on React. The basic insight is that instead of using only the big-O notation for runtime complexity (how long the runtime slows down as a function of the rough size of a problem, or occasionally other dimensions, such as memory usage), we should have a Big-Coffee Notation for what the demands scale for the poor developer, who has to keep things in their own poor, caffeinated brain.

Gerald Weinberg's classic book The Psychology of Computer Programming works out a basic insight at admirable length. The core insight is that programmers programming computers is not just an activity that involves computers. It's also an activity that involves people, and we would do well to treat it as such. Perhaps we should also know the limits of computers, but the human side of this is not, in any sense, trivial. Weinberg may have...