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The Story of Nel (deusinmachina.net)
36 points by Decabytes 10 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 7 comments





[From the footer: "For those who don’t know this is a parody of The brilliant Story of Mel if you’ve never read it I highly recommend it!"]

I like what the author is saying.

I, too, just code in my terminal (but with vi, of course ;-), and only occasionally DDG a programming language or bash question. I also kindof miss VS EE, but I don't use or target anything by Microsoft, so no need, really.

But, really, I'm just focused on simplifying my coding patterns then being consistent with them. It's an iterative process, where the end goal is as much contraction of the codebase as it is expanding it to add new features.

One of (IIRC) Picasso's children said that their father would work on his canvas for a while, then just sit and stare at it, for hours sometimes, and then repeat that process, perhaps over days. Then, one day, after his usual period of just staring, he would say, "It's done.", and would be done.

I didn't realize until I was nearly 50 that I'm really an artist who works in code, but here we are.

And there, just like in my food, where I abhor articial ingredients, I prefer real intelligence.


this is a common-enough mode among painters, for sure.. but I wouldn't praise Pablo Picasso too much, myself. He was well known for an abusive temperament and other not great attributes

One has nothing to do with the other.

I don't think this actually is a parody like the author claims. It's more of a pastiche, but a pretty bad one since the core conceit of Story of Mel was that it was real, while this is just made up nonsense.

Funny :) I was thinking about the old story noted at the end of the article while reading this article.

Cool little story.


Is this a joke of some kind? Can people really not even remember the syntax of a for loop?

Yes it is a joke of some kind. Well, parody/play on/pastiche of an old story about Mel that’s linked at the end. Read it if you haven’t already, it’s worth your time.



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