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maratcyesterday at 2:10 PM2 repliesview on HN

You want to be a cog wheel, in a company of cog wheels. There's nothing wrong with that. But I want to be an artist, and preferably in a company of artists, having been in a company of cog wheels too many times. Not only it's more fun that way, but also tends to lead to better outcomes.


Replies

tclancyyesterday at 6:46 PM

Wowsers. As what I think is a fellow traveler, I would encourage you to look back at all the places you created art and ask how many friends you made at each stop.

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kstrauseryesterday at 3:42 PM

That's an uncharitable take and I urge you to reconsider. I also take great joy and pride in the art of writing beautiful code. I have no desire to be a cog in a machine. However, my ADHD brain is delighted to not have to make a million little distracting decisions in place of the code planning I should be doing. Formatters let me concentrate on writing the best data structures and APIs and algorithms instead of how many spaces to put before comment markers or while kind of quote mark is more aesthetically pleasing in this particular file.

I, too, want to be an artist. For me, the flow of data through my work is the artistry, not the typography of the code.

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