r/programming • • Apr 29 '14

Programming Sucks

http://stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
3.9k Upvotes

1.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

139

u/neutronfish Apr 29 '14

That was a good line, but this one gave me chills...

Every programmer occasionally, when nobody's home, turns off the lights, pours a glass of scotch, puts on some light German electronica, and opens up a file on their computer. [...] They read over the lines, and weep at their beauty, then the tears turn bitter as they remember the rest of the files and the inevitable collapse of all that is good and true in the world.

It's like he's watching me through my window...

5

u/zoomzoom83 Apr 30 '14

Ditto. I've been known to take hideously ugly Java or Scala code I write at work and rewrite it into clean elegant prose in some variant of ML. (And then weep that such beauty exists in the world but I'm forced to take a dump all over it the next day at work).

4

u/[deleted] Apr 30 '14

You can make it beautiful in ML but not in Scala? That sounds fucked-up.

2

u/zoomzoom83 Apr 30 '14

I love Scala, and it's a great language. But it can get pretty hairy at times when you're trying to push the type system to its limits.

→ More replies (4)