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 ;)

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 23rd, 2006 at 7:20 pm and is filed under Rails. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a comment. Pinging is currently not allowed.

7 comments

  1. Jamie Hill
    March 27, 2006 at 11:23 am

    I’ll take your word for it.

  2. gunnar
    April 5, 2006 at 8:26 am

    is it really beautiful code?
    imho beautiful code is code that easy to read, not that looks good at a distance ;P

  3. Jamie Hill
    April 5, 2006 at 11:03 am

    gunnar: I completely agree, this must just be a phase I’m going through. I suppose this is more unnecessary syntactical beauty?

  4. UncleD
    April 11, 2006 at 9:41 am

    That’s right! You know what though, if you enjoy writing it that way and it remains readable, that’s what matters in the end. Do what will make you happy while you work.

    Best Regards

  5. Maz
    August 6, 2006 at 5:57 pm

    You’re not alone. Particularly in reference to having the array elements all neatly aligned. They’re just far easier to read that way.

  6. Jamie
    August 6, 2006 at 11:17 pm

    Maz: Glad I’m not the only one ;)

  7. dwoodman
    September 21, 2006 at 9:20 am

    Why not -

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

    If God had meant all variable names to be the same length, He would never have given us tabs!

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