Where's the fish ?

Where was I ?

Oh yeah, I was reading.

I liked Joel back when he knew a question or two, before he turned into one of those crazy bosses that approves things.

If you have a couple of beers and a thirst for arcana, Stevey's another first on his first name (I'd love one of those) who rants a good question . 'Twasn't he who twittered

Whereas it is possible to read without writing, the converse is perverse

but he reminded me of it tonight with by claiming that

Being a career programmer gives you an interesting perspective on issues not directly related to programming. You start to see parallels.

To Joel!

Bye Steve, thanks for the fish, I find a figment of fleeting interest in the wider perspectives of a career programmer at Google. (Especially Google now that you mention it). Nothing personal, perchance I prefer programmers' particular perspectives. Especially those who don't remember what a "career" is.

• I write code
• I read code
• I dream code
• I read about code
• I only take drugs is to improve the clarity of the code.
• I have never worked a day in my life since I coded "Hello" into a VAX 11-750 (this was back before we discovered the "World")

I write in a more logical, structured, and agreed language than I read, but the concepts are the same in both, albeit I only write a subset of the readings' flights of fancy.

Recently I reliably remembered a relevant post, documented a few tests, tried it out, and it worked. Been doing that a lot lately.

Today I even caught myself doing some design !

Nobody got hurt, it all worked out smoothly, code was cleaner at the end, but ... I don't do design. I do broken code, fix it up as you go along. The reason I love up-front testing is that I know Murphy roolz, whereas up-front design is entirely wasted effort: why bother speculating before we know what the real bugs are ? (IMNSHO, YMMV)

So, to find myself intelligently applying a design principle , ..., kinda surprising all right. But then again not,

If you were to be off reading programmers' blogs you'd soon get the idea that we are a different breed altogether, that the thinking we do is

1. logical
2. structured
3. agreed

whereas we're really pattern matching, same as the lusers.

All the "Engineering" airs are post-hoc justifications, and eternally risible. (Except insofar as the "real" Engineers are pattern-matching too, but let's not go there. I gotta work with those guys).

No, no - we are more like scientists we have

• a theoretical dreaming role
• an experimental smashing role

I prefer smashing stuff.