

Programming sucks - source99
http://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks

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rebekah-aimee
This post is beautiful. I have to show this to my mom.

Was that last example Obfuscated-C or something? I can't even tell. It's just
that lovely. Of course I want to live in a world where that wins contests.

There's just something wonderful about a culture with this much openly
acknowledged absurdity. People who sometimes literally dream in code, who have
an unstoppable urge to grep books, who have had others point out grammatical
errors because they reflexively ended a sentence with a semicolon;

But there's a lucidity about it. "Yes, I taught my computer to speak
orangutan. As a side project, I scare normal people. What are your hobbies?"

In programming, you don't have to pretend to be reasonable. You can genuinely
like what you do, and that usually makes you so good at it that you can get by
with having your boss hear that your computer now knows fifty definitions of
"Ook." And there's something incredibly special about making hardened
bureaucrats take that without losing dignity.

I can't tell if the writer actually dislikes programming or not. (May seem an
incredible statement.) But for how much programmers half-seriously complain
about how ridiculous their work is, I don't know a one who would've gone back
in time and told their younger self not to learn programming. Maybe they'd
have said not to try to make a corporate career out of it, but that's more the
brokenness of corporate structure than of programming proper.

