Yeah that's right, it is. If you're a working programming, you spend a good amount of your time writing in a language few people understand and then a bunch of time writing in english to help people understand what the hell your run-on overly complicated login function does. What you probably did is believe that you'd document it later and then you tried to be clever. That was a mistake; you're not Shakespeare or Chaucer. Your cut and paste, cargo-culted crap reads like a 4th grade essay on the death penalty. There needs to be a serious change on how we look at the work products produced from programming.
When you buy a cabinet, a chair, or anything from a master craftsman, do they design it with some clever way to sit in it and then write a manual in terrible english prose to explain how you should be sitting in it? NO!... Well at least not most of them, maybe some douche-bag avant-garde retro-bauhaus designer would, but who cares. Let's face it, in life most of what you do will not be sophisticated or clever or even fun. It will be work. The difference is not between how you deal with the opportunity for creativity but the opportunity for craftsmanship.
There are a few things that I've noticed in my short term in industry
- You will do more craft than art in life (even if you're an artist)
- If you do something at the limits of your comprehension, you will not understand it later
- Cleverness leads to sadness
After writing those down a few days ago, I've had some time to reflect on what that all means. It also gave me time to decide that the first and last concepts, while important, are just not as useful as the second; I'm throwing them away for now. Really the most important thing you need to remember is:
If you do something at the limits of your comprehension, you will not understand it later
On second thought, maybe this post was the limits of what I can understand; I should stop trying to say something profound...
