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cause like, yeah, it's good to know how to write optimal code and how to make it elegant and easy to maintain, sure!

but one thing you have to maintain is your brain. If you're constantly driving your programming brain at maximum speed, maximum awareness of all possible caveats and vulnerabilities, always considering "how will I maintain this code in ten years time?" you're going to burn yourself out.

You're associating programming with a high-stress high-attention activity. That's going to make programming something that's categorized in your brain as no fun, never relaxing, never something you do just cause it would be interesting... you're going to start dreading it, even just a little. "oh well, let's get this over with."

That's not a good way to think about it in the long run.

we often say that programming is more an art than a science, but we need to treat it like one too.

Sometimes you need to paint a sunset not because someone paid you to paint a sunset, but because it'd be fun to paint a sunset.

we need a bob ross of programming

@foone Come now.

Programming is an engineering discipline! There are very few happy little accidents. You want code that does exactly what you intended it to.

Everyone understandably loves Bob Ross, I do too, but he isn't a good example for programmers, engineers, surgeons, or airplane pilots to follow.

@pippin @foone Writing a program that doesn't actually work doesn't seem more frustrational than recreational to me!

@pippin @foone Even in the demo scene, 98% of the accidents are errors that need to be corrected or else nothing will happen (I did write "very few happy accidents", not "no".)

And hacking on old machines is even more exacting. When people get unexpected results out of old gear, it's the result of a huge amount of systematic, exploratory trial and error, much closer to science than art.

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