Konstantin Plotnikov

The diagrams are easier to understand than textual notation for node-link languages like state machines. However, diagrams do not offer good reasoning guidelines. To reason about SM diagrams, one has to trace all possible paths in it. For complex diagrams, this leads to combinatory explosion, because state becomes path dependent.

For textual notation that closely mirrors diagrams, like M.F. textual DSL the problem became more acute because path becomes broken and textual node look up is needed to trace a complete path. This requires attention jumps and mode switches.

This is why programs written using assembler (or old flat BASIC, or FORTRAN 66) are hard to understand. To understand them, only has to trace all possible paths in the program. C or Pascal are big jump in usability relative to them, because they offer a new way of reasoning. One does not need to track all paths; one need to reason along structure of tree of blocks and statements.

An alternative text notation here offers alternative way of reasoning about states and commands.

Note, in the old specifications, there were a lot of flow diagrams or visual representation of data. In newer specification these visual diagrams were replaced by structured pseudo-code. This is because it is easier to reason about it.

Strange that such big articles on music and programming (original and this one) does not mention even in passing the chapter from the classic book Peopleware. I thought that book addressed issue already in good details.

The core argument is that music seriosly interfer with creativity. There is "uncreative work", but listening to music interfering with ways to find patterns in this work and making it creative.

https://dzone.com/articles/making-java-fluent-api-more-flexible - link to my article on how to make such pattern a bit more flexible in Java to support large builders.

I do not expect any differences, because in the runtime they looks the same anyway. However, the last time I've checked Lombok had problems on JDK 10 and up, so it might be a good idea to wait until that problem fixed.