The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination.-Frederick P. Brooks, "The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering"
coder's notebook
/*
* monday was a good day, i wrote some nice lines
* read and re-read, refined until they were spare,
* so spare that every word meant exactly one thing
* and the thing they meant, was the thing i meant.
* when the day was over, i could look over the text
* and even see beauty in the way the words wove
* a sinous path through the white space
*/
/*
* yesterday i had writer's block and at the end of the day
* i had written no lines, though at various times
* through the day, if you had glanced at my screen
* you might have thought things were going well.
* i wrote lines that i did not believe in,
* hoping that at least my anger at the bad lines
* would help me find the good lines.
*/
/*
* i have in my notebook, all the pieces i need to finish this
* i just have not found a believable, or beautiful way
* to connect them, to flow from the beginning to the ending.
* if i just sit down again today and try to bang out something
* it will be just another copy of yesterday
* which i may need to do, before i finally see the light
* i am hoping, however, that something better happens
*/
/*
* what is most likely, is that my work from day before yesterday
* is not as beautiful or perfect as i thought it was
* i have written myself into a corner.
* somewhere in those lines is a left turn
* that should have been a leap upwards. a phrase so ugly,
* i won't be able to believe i didn't catch it before,
* once repaired, the rest will almost write itself.
*/
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