[ryandrake]

This is one of the reasons I got away from writing commercial software and now only write code as a hobby.

To me, the code itself is the product. I want the code to look like a beautiful painting—the fact that it does something is secondary. I’ll sit there for hours working on things like const correctness, and making sure each class has the bare minimum amount of state/instance variables, making sure function arguments are named and ordered consistently, even though it has no effect on user-visible bugs or runtime performance. I’m the kind of person that paints the back of the cabinet. Even though no user will see it, I will know it is there.

Obviously this mentality is at odds with commercial software’s imperative to shit out barely working spaghetti code as fast and cheaply as possible, so I opted out.

[cgh]

“Paints the back of the cabinet” is a great analogy. LLM-driven production is so far away from this mindset.

[lanstin]

Have you ever done research mathematics? To me, the only difference between code and math is that the code can do things, make stuff happens in the world; outside of that, mathematics has a lot more opportunities to be beautiful (not to say that there isn't beautiful code, but the beauty is not central in the way it often is in mathematics).

[hnlmorg]

Yeah, a lot of businesses definitely do push things too far the other way and advocate releasing _anything_ regardless of how well it works.

I'm strongly against the "move fast and break things" mentality. But there is a happy middle ground between architecting works of art, and shipping urinals with faulty plumbing.

[fdsfsdsd]

Although in this case it's more like using the paint in the tin to paint the tin itself. It's useless and completely missing the point of why the paint exists in the first place.

You do you, I'm sorry if I come across rude and stupid, but I am both things. But "code is the product" is what IMO caused the downfall of this entire profession. No wonder everyone is trying to get rid of us. I wouldn't want a plumber that's obsessed with the tubes itself and not whether my house has working plumbing in a reasonable time frame and within budget.

[stouset]

Despite the gallons of ink spilled on the subject I have not worked at a single place in my 30-year career where developers sat around perfecting masterpieces.

I have worked at a never-ending list of places where people shipped the first thing that worked, built spaghetti around it, something else got built on top, and the original thing is now critical infrastructure that takes 10x longer to fix bugs or add needed features to than it would have if we’d taken 1.5x longer to ship it in the first place. I have worked at a never-ending list of places where developers beg for time to be set aside to deal with the worst parts that sap their time, energy, or will to continue working at the job. I have worked at a never-ending list of places that eventually sets aside a few days to tackle these tasks, when the engineers estimate two or three weeks. I have worked at a never-ending list of places that then uses the failure of these momentary diversions as evidence that their engineers don’t know what they’re talking about and should shut up and ship more features.

I sure wish I knew what masterpiece factories you must have spent your career working at.

[agentultra]

I feel like the navel-gazing-ivory-tower programmer is almost a straw man used by commenters and bloggers to make themselves sound pragmatic. Summoned only be be torn down. Never to be found on an existing software team.

I have come across the architecture astronaut before. But I feel like they’re the result of the culture of the ecosystem the language. The Java and C# programmers whose language requires you to juggle weak types with visibility keywords and null ability. They can be forgiven for not being able to implement a priority queue without a committee and a class hierarchy deeper than the Mariana Trench.

But the perfectionist that never ships anything useful and only ever tweaks interfaces and types? Never met one.

Most people are just trying to balance progress with practical concerns.

[hnlmorg]

That maybe true, but the reason we are having this conversation was because people made those kind of comments. Which lead me to defend Bellard’s POCs.

[stouset]

This sub-thread was in reply to someone who stated that "'code is the product' is what IMO caused the downfall of this entire profession".

[hnlmorg]

…and my comment was in reply to someone who stated they’d never met a programmer who values attractive code over shipping a product. ;)

[qdotme]

I’ve been in this profession for two decades as well. As both things.

My take on this is that we need both, because the market is cyclical. It’s just that it’s hard to perceive any of those cycles if you (a) live them (b) are not experienced enough to introspect.

I absolutely would love an obsessed plumber (and got one!) when it comes to deciding that we’re going to do PTFE tubing in our new house. An obsessed electrician in charge to overinvest into our grid, rather than a 3-month timeframe executive. Otherwise our critical infrastructure gets myopically degraded.

I also want the “working within timeframe” outcome.

And we, as an industry, swing wildly in both direction. The Cambrian explosion of shareware was the the former. We course-corrected into cathedrals of good software (I still love Windows 2000’s stability, the pinnacle of NT line), followed by the “reasonable timeframe” 4GB Electron apps, etc.

It will swing. Every complex system from logistic equation upwards will oscillate .