Mimicry

In a sense, much of our learning derives from mimicry. The magic of intelligence is not its mimicry, but its adaptive potential. One of my greatest foibles is a lack of abstraction. I see, I discover, I imitate, and when tomorrow arrives, I've learnt in a linear fashion, instead of dispersing that knowledge into connections. It is like a puzzle game where you see doors with a green lock all game, and eventually find the green key. However, if you only recall the location of the last green door, the rest of those connections you made on your entire play-through are squandered. 

In programming, old languages (and even new languages, sometimes) require the developer to consider memory. In those old languages, you specifically asked for segments of memory, and constructed pointers to access those memory instances. When you finished using that memory space, you cleared the space from the program's usage. This way, you don't end up with memory leaks in your code that lead to all your computer's memory disappearing and your program swallowing all your computer's computation and memory.

More modern languages abstract away that clean-up in a process called "garbage collection". When you lack abstraction, you aren't connecting those pointers. Your mental program is wasting space with leaked memories, floating about in your head without having revived those dusty corridors of brain-space. This is my artistic failing. I'm swimming in a sea of lost pointers and memory leakages, and every new fact is isolated and devoid of translation.