Posts Tagged Programming
Plumbing in This Old House
Posted by joe in Geeky, Programming on November 13, 2009
This passage resonates with me some days:
Programming starts out like it’s going to be architecture–all black lines on white paper, theoretical and abstract and spatial and up-in-the-head. Then, right around the time you have to get something fucking working, it has this nasty tendency to turn into plumbing.
…
It’s more like you’re hired as a plumber to work in an old house full of ancient, leaky pipes laid out by some long-gone plumbers who were even weirder than you are. Most of the time you spend scratching your head and thinking: Why the fuck did they do that?
From the novel, "The Bug", by Ellen Ullman. Didn’t read the book (yet).