Code beauty vs. Obsession

Jamie Hill March 23, 2006

Rails

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 =&gt; "public/master",
  :scaled_dir =&gt; "public/variants",
  :tmp_dir =&gt; "public/temp"
}

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

thing = {
  :storage_dir =&gt; "public/master",
  :variant_dir =&gt; "public/variants",
  :tmp_img_dir =&gt; "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 😉