Binary Code

Andrew Brown over at the Guardian writes in “Programming is destroying my capacity for reflective thought” (and I pilfer his closing paragraph here since the rest is just him complaining about moving his blog from one platform to another):

The difference between a sentence that works and one that doesn’t can be quite as large and important as the difference between a computer program that works and one which causes a satellite to crash for want of a semicolon; but capacity for patient, reflective thought needed to hear what’s wrong with a sentence is exactly what programming drives out of my mind.

Which reminds me of the old joke:

Patient: Doctor, doctor! It hurts when I do this!
Doctor: Then don’t do that.

Alas Mr. Brown while I understand your sentiment, from what I gather of your opening paragraph:

Maybe I’m growing stupid, but I find that programming destroys my capacity for reason. I spent much of last week moving my little blog from Movable Type over to WordPress; something that might have been easy, except that I wanted the change to be unnoticed by the outside world.

you weren’t programming, you were fiddling with CSS and HTML and some basic PHP tags. Calling that “programming” is akin to throwing small rocks from one pile to another and calling it “construction”.

Follow-up
In the post above I am rather flippantly dismissive of the troubles Mr. Brown was having. Make no mistake: I don’t consider CSS + HTML to equal programming (flame away those who’ve build careers as “programmers” doing it, I’ll explain why another time) however that doesn’t change the fact that working in the guts of software often sucks. To wit: “Hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer elation.”

My favourite analogy when trying to help people understand “programming” is construction. Specifically the construction of houses. To a contractor, spending a whole day blowing spray-in foam insulation into a new home is an exercise in abject tedium at best, a filthy mess taking hours to clean up at worst. But is it reasonable for that contractor to say “Gah, spraying insulation is mind-numbingly dull – construction sucks!” Not so much. A facet of construction sucks, sometimes.

Here’s the rub: some part of everything sucks every now and then. Get fixated on that one part and you have a forest/trees problem. Unfortunately it sounds as though Mr. Brown stopped at blowing foam and has yet to discover the joy of picking up a hammer.