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Recently I had the wonderful experience of solving a hard problem in a very elegant way. I spent hours going through iteration after iteration, each one slight
by palish 19y ago
Recently I had the wonderful experience of solving a hard problem in a very elegant way. I spent hours going through iteration after iteration, each one slightly more ugly than the last, until I stumbled upon an amazingly simple solution that completely solved the problem far better than any of the previous methods. I spent the rest of the night revelling in the clarity and simplicity of the solution; I've never taken any drugs, but it must have felt very much like being high. Does anyone else experience similar highs while coding?
Shawn
- omouse 19y agoSome Lisp coders have mentioned brain orgasms when discovering something great about the language. I was bouncing around for a few hours when I removed 20 lines of Python and replaced it with one line
- vikram 19y agoRecently, I've been on a high when I got my lisp code to run 60% faster by changing 10 lines of code. I think I tend to experience relief more often than high while coding. Highs are like a promise that something good is going to happen soon. My brain is telling me I have an answer just let me find the words.
- vlad 19y agoI was really proud to write a php-object to JSON converter with many for-loops and indentation, and then seeing that it worked for my needs. However, I was really upset that PHP4 didn't have it built-in as I would rather not go through that. However, that does not compare to the feeling I have when I create a great user-interface. Maybe not pretty, but when I figure out how to add a few things here or there and a new feature that makes sense but doesn't get in the user's way, and something I would love to have, and I know others would love it, too, and I know it's so good others will copy it--that's when I really, really get excited. I get really excited and say "yeah" outloud when I have those moments.