Programming Style
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out the “best” coding style, environment, language, abstraction. One of my mentors over the years once turned to me as we were working on some code and, after I’d delivered a particularly vehement critique of the code I’d been working on, simply said “Rick, there’s no such thing as ‘perfect code’.” And that was it. I never knew him to be a man of many words, but he knew the craft better than any I’d ever met. It struck me at the time, but the simple truth of it has resonated with increasing impact over the years.
Part of it is that, from all the evidence I’ve gathered, I have to to conclude that different systems and methods and mental models work for different people. Such a relativistic view is somehow disappointing to the part of me that seeks universal truth, but the longer I spend programming, the more I realize that the methods that work the best for me (dynamic languages, REPLs, experimentation with many prototypes) not only aren’t appealing to some, they simply aren’t as effective as an IDE with code completion and an incremental compiler for them. It really is relative. Various artists choose different tools. Just as as some writers pen their manuscripts by hand, some use typewriters, and yet others use Emacs, different programmers choose the tools of their craft with equal discretion.
Perhaps it’s not all that surprising, but some part of me still wishes there were some ultimate answer to the art of computer programming.
