TITLE: I Have Written That Code
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: May 30, 2022  8:32 AM
DESC: 
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BODY:

 Last month, I picked up a copy of <em>The Writing Life</em> by Annie
 Dillard at the library.  It's one of those books that everyone seems to
 quote, and I had never read it.  I was pleased to find it is a slim
 volume.

 It didn't take long to see one of the often-quoted passages, on the page
 before the first chapter:

<blockquote><em>
 No one expects the days to be gods.  -- Emerson
</em></blockquote>

 Then, about a third of the way in, came the sentences for which everyone
 knows Dillard:

<blockquote><em>
 How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
 What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.
</em></blockquote>

 Dillard's portrayal of the writing life describes some of the mystery
 that we non-writers imagine, but mostly it depicts the ordinariness of
 daily grind and the extended focus that looks like obsession to those
 of us on the outside.

 Occasionally, her stories touched on my experience as a writer of
 programs.  Consider this paragraph:

<blockquote><em>
 Every year the aspiring photographer brought a stack of his best prints
 to an old, honored photographer, seeking his judgment.  Every year the
 old man studied the prints and painstakingly ordered them into two
 piles, bad and good.  Every year that man moved a certain landscape
 print into the bad stack.  At length he turned to the young man: "You
 submit this same landscape every year, and every year I put it on the
 bad stack.  Why do you like it so much?"  The young photographer said,
 "Because I had to climb a mountain to get it."
</em></blockquote>

 I have written that code.  I bang my head against some problem for days
 or weeks.  Eventually, I find a solution.  Sometimes it's homely code
 that gets the job; usually it seems more elegant than it is, in relief
 against the work that went into discovering it.  Over time, I realize
 that I need to change it, or delete it altogether, in order to make
 progress on the system in which it resides.  But... the mountain.

 It's a freeing moment when I get over the fixation and make the change
 the code needs.  I'll always have the mountain, but my program needs
 to move in a different direction.
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