4 ms·
Ask HN: What do you strive for when you are programming?
- angersock 10y agoTo drive developers before me, and to hear the lamentations of their users--that is what is best in life.
- willcate 10y agoAs few mistakes as possible.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y agoA paycheck.
- SyneRyder 10y agoThis made me laugh... but as a solo/indie dev, a primary concern when I'm coding is that I'm making something valuable that customers will actually pay for. I might really want to refactor some of my code and make it more elegant, but that in itself provides no benefit to customers, so I have to remind myself not to spend too much time on it. The code I write has to be something that makes customers more money, saves them time, fixes problems, or delights them even more than previous versions.
- greydius 10y agoMy highest priority is writing code that is maintainable, so I strive for modularity, appropriate abstractions, and comprehensive tests.
- droidist2 10y agoExactly this. Too often I see people focusing on performance as their top concern for no good reason.
- DyslexicAtheist 10y ago"flow", which is a concept / phenomenon studied by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. It is not just limited to software engineering: http://blog.valbonne-consulting.com/2014/09/24/flow-the-addiction-behind-programming/ http://blog.valbonne-consulting.com/2014/09/24/flow-the-addi...
- pizza 10y agoDo you drink coffee? Have you ever ingested stimulants while coding? edit: I say this b/c of the state of hyper-focus one can maintain, whether for the better or not.
- afarrell 10y agoIn contrast, I strive to avoid flow. I find that when I get into flow, I skip over things and write overly-clever code.
- bbcbasic 10y agoGood abstractions
- afarrell 10y agoClarity, both on my understanding of the problem and in my understanding of my tools. Simplicity and readability of my code, my tests, and the notes that accompany my code. That way someone (including my future self) can understand the system. And writing tests first. I've become convinced that there are very very few cases when I can afford the luxury of not insisting on writing a test first.
- baccheion 10y agoI enjoy coming up with clean and elegant solutions. I enjoy solving the problem, and producing code that works, works well, is fast, and is therapeutic to read. I like everything separated out and grouped as appropriate, I like when there isn't any unnecessary code or complexity, and I like when the problem is solved completely, precisely, and without any compromises. Clear, clean (simple, compact, readable, etc, while still being correct and complete), elegant, efficient, well-formatted, properly separated and grouped, optimal (no unnecessary or premature optimizations), etc.
- siscia 10y agoIt depends on whom you write the code for and why. If I write code so that other people can use it I strive for coming out with the best API possible (for whatever definition of "best" makes sense for the project) if I write for experiment or fun I just want to get thing done and see if it works so I write in the most fastest way possible, if there is some change that I need to work again with the code I try to write it in the most maintainable way possible.
- r2dnb 10y agoI strive for simplicity: Producing a maintainable and extendable solution being the simplest possible solution to the problem. Simple means both easy to understand APIs, healthy internals and judicious use of abstractions (no overkill). Producing a complex solution for a complex problem is by my standards mediocre engineering. When you focus on simplicity everything follows (and your technical skills skyrocket because it requires to be extremely skilled to make things simple).
- probinso 10y agoMinimal branching Factor and then fewest lines of code finally modularity
- vmorgulis 10y agoFun!