Category: personal

Steve Yegge (emphasis added):

So how do you make yourself a superstar? Never stop learning. I’ve heard people say they think this position is a crock, that it’s ludicrous, that you couldn’t possibly spend your whole career learning new things.

But I think differently. I think every program you write should be the hardest you’ve ever written. And that’s what I blog about, mostly. Improving yourself.

It got me thinking today and the more I think about it the more sense it makes. I would go even further with this and say that writing not just hard programs but simply more complicated code is good for you. Not obfuscated nor unreadable but code which is just a bit harder to understand. What I mean is using new constructs, new methodologies, shorter one-liners (but not those super-obfuscated Perl ones), etc.

There are lots of people who will tell you that you should write the simplest code possible (even despite the obvious bloat) because this results in a more maintainable application. This is of course true, but should the maintainability be the ultimate goal? I think that self-improvement should be a higher placed goal. And I think that you self-improve by writing code you need more time to comprehend because the harder code you write now and the more time you spend understanding it in the future the less complicated it becomes. Over time. And that is progress. That is self-improvement. Plus, as a side effect of this, your code is usually more concise.

Now going back to refactoring one of my projects…