When coding at work, I periodically remind myself to take some pride on the sheer quantity of code that I manipulate. If I don't, I become depressed. If I stop to realize that I just modified 40 lines of code simply to add a member variable to a COM wrapper around a C++ object, I'm likely to die a little inside, and then go "waste time" by reading about monads or category theory or abstract interpretation.
Posted on September 3, 2003 12:33 PM
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That seems to be more of a statement on the current state of programming tools than anything else.
Huge frameworks that require you to move mountains of code to achieve the smallest effect bug me. They could use some advice from Alan Kay: Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
It is a sorry state of affairs that we need to resort to such mindlessly activity in order to feel productive. But hey, if things were otherwise, we wouldn't have the motivation to "waste time" now would we?
-K
Posted by: Kaushik at September 6, 2003 01:50 AMIt's not that I "resort" to mindless activity to feel productive. It's that I don't feel very productive because the languages and tools I have to use require such mindless activity. I like feeling productive, and I get depressed if I don't. So I try to remind myself that I am actually doing a lot of work even if it doesn't have all that much effect.
I also try to advocate for doing things in a better way, but this usually gets a very tepid, even reactionary, response.
Posted by: kim at September 6, 2003 11:12 AMYes, I know what you mean. I too feel depressed when I am not productive; moreover I get a kind of a high when I have been particularly productive on a certain day. But it is hard to justify all that work if it doesn't result in something substantial.
If you're putting in a lot of work but it doesn't have that much effect, then you aren't being all that productive, are you?
In fact, you're doing very little work if you consider the definition of "work" from physics ( work = force × displacement), since the resulting "displacement" is very little. Much of the energy expended seems to be lost as heat.
-K
(not a physicist)
Yep :(
Posted by: kim at September 6, 2003 02:20 PMI think people give a tepid response because
the mountain of work required to make the
system better is daunting. Ultimately, this
is where scripting languages like Perl come
from: There are lots of things you can do
in C++ to wrapper up tedious tasks that are
hard to do right, as long as you use the
wrapper. After enough wrapper layers, you
have a script-like environment
-The Other K