I personally have aphantasia, and, funny enough, I don't visualize anything when I'm coding, or reading code: I just understand the concept more or less deeply, but always without any images: It's just the "concept" that I understand. It's really like if I had an interpreter in my head when reading and when coding, I do the opposite: I know the required sequence and I reverse engineer it to the programming language version.
I am reassured by noticing that idiot is following me. The way I figure it, the fact that past Me is a coding idiot means that present Me has improved as a programmer. I hope that continues indefinitely and that future Me will consider present Me an idiot as well.
I have kind of a crummy mind's eye, so my mind spontaneously produces vague "fantasy mechanisms" that seem to float in a void and interact with one another in some way that is analogous to the program, but there's no coherent metaphor and I don't think these visualizations actually hold any useful information or help in any way.
So at least for me: no, definitely no schema in mind. If you're missing out on that, so am I! Affect is weird.
I have aphantasia and have long thought that my lack of a mind’s eye might be an asset for programming, much like how a blind person will typically have better-than-average hearing.
If programming is best done through abstract thought and doesn’t benefit from pictures, then I’ve been training since the day I was born.
I have aphantasia too an I do a lot of game jams where I more or less make something from start to finish in one go.
One of the things I noticed is I approach a game from the point of view of how it is played, whereas most people approach games from the perspective of what it is about. I'll make a navigation game with a pirate theme as opposed to a game about pirates where you navigate.
I also don't use engines and make something from scratch each time. These factors may go hand in hand, I build up from the mechanics instead of fashioning a scene into a game.
Many of us work the way you do, more or less of the time, and I think the fair term to use for that is fluency.
But I also think there are many working engineers, including some who have been in the trade for a very long time, that don't develop it.
There are surely other roads to doing good work without fluency, just like there is when forced to work in a foregin language with only modest proficiency, but I can't help but suspect it's a much more exhausting experience.
I had to really consider it because while I am familiar with synesthesia I never really thought it would apply in my case, but when I got deeply into thinking about it the sensations are pretty much in the exact same case.
I think its why I might get a little too irritable at silly code!
Honestly, I'm not sure that I do. It feels like I do, as the deeper that I get into a complex system, the more clearly I can see the whole and how all of the parts interact.
But if I try to draw it? Usually I'll lose state and can't really picture it as well. I'd have to rebuild state as a graphic representation to do that.
So... I don't really know how my mind is organizing it, tbh.
Do you guys really have schema in mind??