Making connections vs reducing

What you work on affects your ability to see the world.

I haven't had time to write a structured post in a while, mostly because I have been looking into some new technology involving lots of programming. It seems to me that the "programming" state of mind is very different from the "making connections between different fields" state of mind.

Programming is about breaking a problem into parts, coding to implement each part and testing every possible outcome to be sure that the overall code does not break in the context in which it has been thought.

Making connections between different fields is about deciding what is interesting in each of them, and trying to link them together in a way that is impossible to code with a programming language. The reduction, which allows us to pick a specific feature of a field, is very different from any mathematical approach and it is also dynamical, in the sense that the whole coherent thought can be changed continuously, thanks to our ability to constantly modify our reductions at will, without losing the "underlying" connections between each reduction.