The art of the programmer

"...I was taught in college that one ought to figure out a program completely on paper before even going near a computer. I found that I did not program this way. I found that I liked to program sitting in front of a computer, not a piece of paper. Worse still, instead of patiently writing out a complete program assuring myself it was correct, I tended to just spew code that was hopelessly broken, and gradually beat it into shape. Debugging, I was taught, was a kind of final pass where you caught typos and oversights. The way I worked, it seemed like programming consisted of debugging." (from "Hackers and Painters, big ideas from the computer age" by Paul Graham).

I particularly like the above-cited passage of the book. I recommend to anyone who "loves" programming to read it (the book I mean). It's not really like reading a book on how to program or any of those things, but it's a bunch of nice essays which relate very well to people like us. See, the way he says it, is the way I love to program and from there I understand people who prefer the refactoring approach (to the modelling one) which by the way I'll take anytime over any other. The only thing is that there are those moments when as a programmer, you ask yourself whether you have to follow the rules of software engineering or whether you just have to sit and start writing code and put things together as you go; with of course in mind your final objective.

The other thing I love about this book is that the author, as strange as it may seem thinks that programming or coding is like art, like painting and that's how I've always seen code. Many times I've found myself looking at code and admiring it as if it was some strange beautiful unreplicable art object and that's also why I've grown to believe that each of us has a very special way of expressing themselves through their code.

Anyways, just felt like sharing these feelings with other programmers. ;-)