I changed the name of my blog from "Sford's Blog" to "The Meditative Coder".
A bit pretentious or pompous? I hope not. I do think about code a lot.
I'm not talking about design. Lots of people could claim to be a meditative designer, striving to make their structure and algorithm are elegant, efficient, and robust. I cut my professional teeth in a culture where coding was considered a low art. Design was where the prestige lay. And architecture? That gets you a corner office and groupies. I'm not kidding! I've seen some pretty mediocre programmers put on a pedestal when they achieved architect status.
I don't want to minimize the importance of a good architectural framework and a good design. However, I think coding sometimes gets short shrift. I think that well laid-out and organized code is beautiful. Given the choice, I would rather maintain a program whose design is so-so and whose code is excellent, than vice versa.
I will admit to spending significant time after I've gotten a program working, just to make the code more readable -- changing variable and function names to be more-precisely descriptive, adding or subtracting whitespace to make the code clauses more logical, even re-factoring the code a bit to have cleaner, more-intuative abstractions, and even adding comments (judiciously).
So yeah, I think I'm a pretty meditative coder, perhaps more-so than average.
Finally, while "Sford's Blog" appeals to my minimalist aesthetic, it was both correct and useless. Besides, "meditative coder" got absolutely NO hits on Google; how can I resist? :-)
I'm not talking about design. Lots of people could claim to be a meditative designer, striving to make their structure and algorithm are elegant, efficient, and robust. I cut my professional teeth in a culture where coding was considered a low art. Design was where the prestige lay. And architecture? That gets you a corner office and groupies. I'm not kidding! I've seen some pretty mediocre programmers put on a pedestal when they achieved architect status.
I don't want to minimize the importance of a good architectural framework and a good design. However, I think coding sometimes gets short shrift. I think that well laid-out and organized code is beautiful. Given the choice, I would rather maintain a program whose design is so-so and whose code is excellent, than vice versa.
I will admit to spending significant time after I've gotten a program working, just to make the code more readable -- changing variable and function names to be more-precisely descriptive, adding or subtracting whitespace to make the code clauses more logical, even re-factoring the code a bit to have cleaner, more-intuative abstractions, and even adding comments (judiciously).
So yeah, I think I'm a pretty meditative coder, perhaps more-so than average.
Finally, while "Sford's Blog" appeals to my minimalist aesthetic, it was both correct and useless. Besides, "meditative coder" got absolutely NO hits on Google; how can I resist? :-)
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