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 threadā¯“ucblockheadJul 16, 2023

@codinghorror There was a large bit of code I wrote about ten years ago for what was then a personal work project. It was "clever" in a way that I really enjoyed while writing. It was only when it went from my personal project to a core library that hundreds of engineers at my company depended on that I realized that all that "cleverness" was antithetical to clarity.

I knew this when I was writing it, but dismissed those thoughts because I thought I'd be the only user.

Lesson learned

Show threadChuck Darwin
@ucblockhead @codinghorror We always think our code is for the purpose we intended -- but any code that works doesn't stop there -- it is pulled and stretched into new uses and contexts
Jul 16, 2023 at 9:32pmWeb