Thursday, October 25, 2007

Subtracting = Simple = Better = Beautiful

Fresh from several years of computer programming, 137-year-old Sirius settles in the LA to finish his research on the behavior of computer programmers. But during his research he found most of the code written so far follows the Brownian motion that happens in physics. He was fascinated by a gentleman (Danash) who learns all the computer languages alphabetically…Ada, Basic, C, C++ etc. His research shows that people are always adding stuff and he thinks: “Kids should learn subtraction at school prior to learning addition”. He remembers in his dream while having fever, that a fat hand starts writing really bad code in solo. There is only one hand coding and the other one is missing. The hand then opens his mouth and starts drinking coffee and throw up almost instantaneously on the code. This goes on for the entire development cycle.

Over time, his disgust towards bad-code forces him into near-insanity, and finally Danash introduces him to a group of people who actually care about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful. He anxiously study and searches for meaning in all the things that had filled and fulfilled his life up to that point.

Their code was like a garden with a few things carefully selected and placed, simple, beautiful. Sirius realized that they also eat in smaller plates, pass the keyboard frequently to each other, laugh frequently, test like there is no tomorrow, and build their software 20 times a day. That was a turning point for Sirius’s research. There were no bad dreams and there were always 4 set of hands involved in any coding episode.

I should take my medicine, before this writing gets totally out of hand.

1 comment:

BearWire said...

I totally agree, take your meds. You have lost me...I think I am going to have to read this again with a good glass of wine or even a nice cigar. Read it slowly, Tead in to it and Read out side of it...