Code like a girl

Yep, you've guessed it if you've just read my previous post. I've found a site I like and it's inspired me with a bunch of posts. That's just the way it works with me. this time is a little different... just a little cos I'm not going to talk about health or exercise !!!!. Yeah, you didn't know I had it in me did you ;-).

So what's the inspiration? Well I'm also a coder, as in I wrote software, web software particularly but software all the same. Because I didn't learn this for my degree I've always gone with what I feel is the best approach I can find and just strived for excellence as I feel it should be achieved. Part of that excellence, for me, comes in nicely organised, nice to look at code. not just something that elegant in it's design but elegant in it's presentation aswell.

Why?
for me it's because I worked on a side project during lunch hours etc that meant I might not touch it for months at a time. So I'd forget where I was and what I meant when I wrote a chunk of code. So when I got back to it I didn't want to spend hours figuring out what I was supposed to achieve or make an error becuase it wasn't obvious how a change would affect the whole. No, I wanted to see this instantly and with little or no effort. Clean well organised code was a big part of my answer and boy did it make a difference to my productivity and enjoyment. I spent so much more time writing solutions than fixing mistakes.

I think a way to explain this to the lay person is to say that a beautiful idea expressed on paper can still be very difficult to understand. If this idea is portrayed by a wordsmith who writes elegant phrases then all of a sudden the elegance and beauty of the idea is there for all to see and the style of writing or even it's presentation simply draw you in. You go from having to force yourself to understand the concept to being amazed at how easy it is to grasp.

I linked to it becuase it's nice to see other people people making the same point and making it very elegantly.