Jeff AtwoodJul 16, 2023
"Of all the cruel tricks in software engineering, this has to be the cruelest. Most of us entered this field because the machines are so much more logical than people. And yet, even when you're writing code explicitly intended for the machine, you're still writing for other people. Fallible, flawed, distracted human beings just like you. And that's the truly difficult part." https://blog.codinghorror.com/coding-its-just-writing/
Coding: It's Just Writing

In The Programming Aphorisms of Strunk and White, James Devlin does a typically excellent job of examining something I've been noticing myself over the last five years: The unexpected relationship between writing code and writing. There is perhaps no greater single reference on the topic of writing than Strunk and

Coding Horror
Show threadHazel Weakly

@codinghorror Coding, engineering, and mathematics are difficult precisely because they are a deeply human and artistic endeavor. There's no way around it.

The best programmers and engineers I know have a deeply nourished and cherished artistic side to themselves. I see a lot of people calling it their escape from work, but I actually think it's one of the most important aspects that makes us good *at* that work

Machines may be logical, but the expression of that logic is an art, and I love it

Jul 16, 2023 at 6:29pmWeb
Show threadJoelJul 16, 2023

@hazelweakly @codinghorror I think this is also why burn out can affect some people more than others.

When the expression of logic is part of one's mental world to navigate everyday, it can be physically painful to have to work with ugly/wrong abstractions.

The art I do in my own time is free from corporate constraints and as a result any related code can be beautiful, in the same way as an elegant mathematical proof.