

The Hungry Programmer - bradly
http://jstorimer.com/2012/01/09/the-hungry-programmer.html

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dasil003
It's interesting as analogies go, but the real problem is that eating is
inevitable. You _will_ eat eventually and consistently. But with code there is
no guarantee you will ever ship. There are many programmers whose quest for
perfection almost completely prevents shipping. On the other hand an obsession
with eating the best food is not nearly so crippling; it is more unilaterally
beneficial despite whatever flaws or inconveniences it may cause (road trips,
wrong definition, etc).

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city41
I have found finding the balance between quality and actually shipping to be
one of the most challenging aspects of being a good developer. Sometimes "good
enough" really is, and other times it really isn't. Distinguishing between the
two (and all the gray in between) takes experience.

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Retric
I think they are orthogonal issues. For any code base there are a list of
things most in need of improvement and a quality threshold to be able to ship.
It's all to easy to spend a lot of time making unimportant things better, but
the problem is not trying to make great code it's working on the wrong area.
If the messaging system sucks and there is no GUI then build a GUI.

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shalmanese
Another way code quality is like food: There's no point in trying to optimize
your diet if something else is going to kill you first.

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richardk
This is an interesting analogy, for me, it doesn't map though. I "believe", if
you'll let me use that word, in code quality, so my attitude towards code
quality is constant. I moved past the urge to knock out quick and crappy
solutions as soon as I shifted my enjoyment from "getting a solution" to
"getting the best solution I am capable of". That is, simply solving a problem
doesn't feel good, I have to solve it as well as I can to get anything out of
it.

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ericwright90
This has to be one of the most self indulgent article I've read in months. I
enjoy the philosophical bits of programming as much the next guy but when did
everything become an analogy for writing code? Bad programming is like
McDonald's? This article is like White Castle: unhealthy and unsatisfying.

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usaar333
I'm normally not the type of person to dis articles, but I just read nearly
900 words and learned nothing. The tl;dr is obvious to any professional
programmer: there are short-term costs but long-term rewards to code
maintainability. Unfortunately, he doesn't argue this point at all (I want to
see data or an least an anecdote), or even tell what is healthy code. Instead,
he opts for an extended analogy to a factually questionable "healthy eating
continuum".

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laconian
Cook very large quantities of food so you can have leftovers later == shaky
analogy for code reuse?

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TheSOB88
Hacking is like painting. Hacking is like eating. Is painting like eating too?

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tikhonj
Approximation can't really be transitive. Otherwise, $1 is "like" $1.01 which
is "like" $1.02 ... which is "like" $100,000,000 ;)

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shoo
Maybe we could allow the quality of the approximation to degrade: if 'hacking
is like painting' and 'hacking is like eating' are ||hacking - painting|| <
\eps and ||hacking - eating|| < \eps respectively, then ||painting - eating||
< 2 \eps. So painting is at least half as like eating as painting is like
hacking.

