TITLE: The Instinct To Discard Code Is A Kind Of Faith
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: December 27, 2015 8:35 AM
DESC:
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BODY:
I learned this
one summer
while writing and deleting the same program several times:
The instinct to discard is finally a kind of faith. It
tells me there's a better way to do this page even though
the evidence is not accessible at the present time.
The engineer in me always whispered that evidence supported the
desire to delete the program and start over: a recognition that
I understood encapsulation of behavior more clearly, or messages
as a means of decoupling subsystems. Yet in the end there is
also small bit of faith. "Surely some of the code I'm deleting
is good enough to survive to the next generation..." The
programmer, like the writer, must be willing to believe in such
situations that "nature will restore itself".
(The above passage is a quote of Don DeLillo from The Paris
Review,
The Art of Fiction No. 135.)
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