Entries from March 2006 ↓

Code beauty vs. Obsession

h3. When does the search for beautiful code become an obsession?

Rightly so, “David Heinemeier Hansson”:http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/000419.html constantly pushes for beautiful code, however this in now becoming an obsession for me and I may soon need professional help…

You know things are getting bad when you do something similar to the following:

thing = {
  :store_dir => "public/master",
  :scaled_dir => "public/variants",
  :tmp_dir => "public/temp"
}

And then _have_ to change it so that the symbol names are the same length!!:

thing = {
  :storage_dir => "public/master",
  :variant_dir => "public/variants",
  :tmp_img_dir => "public/temp"
}

I am finding myself becoming more and more obsessional about stuff like this.

* Where is the threshold?
* When does code beauty become an obsession?

If anyone else is suffering from this terrible disorder, please post here, I need support to get through this ;)