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Coders' Primal Urge To Kill Inefficiency -- Everywhere (wired.com)
For software engineers, lack of friction is an aesthetic joy, an emotional high, the ideal existential state. It's what drives them, and what shapes our world. An excerpt from an upcoming book on coding, via Wired: The thrust of Silicon Valley is always to take human activity and shift it into metabolic overdrive. And maybe you've wondered, why the heck is that? Why do techies insist that things should be sped up, torqued, optimized? There's one obvious reason, of course: They do it because of the dictates of the market. Capitalism handsomely rewards anyone who can improve a process and squeeze some margin out. But with software, there's something else going on too. For coders, efficiency is more than just a tool for business. It's an existential state, an emotional driver.
Coders might have different backgrounds and political opinions, but nearly every one I've ever met found deep, almost soulful pleasure in taking something inefficient -- even just a little bit slow -- and tightening it up a notch. Removing the friction from a system is an aesthetic joy; coders' eyes blaze when they talk about making something run faster or how they eliminated some bothersome human effort from a process. This passion for efficiency isn't unique to software developers. Engineers and inventors have long been motivated by it. During the early years of industrialization, engineers elevated the automation of everyday tasks to a moral good. The engineer was humanity's "redeemer from despairing drudgery and burdensome labor," as Charles Hermany, an engineer himself, wrote in 1904.
[...] Many of today's programmers have their efficiency "aha" moment in their teenage years, when they discover that life is full of blindingly dull repetitive tasks and that computers are really good at doing them. (Math homework, with its dull litany of exercises, was one thing that inspired a number of coders I've talked to.) Larry Wall, who created the Perl programming language, and several coauthors wrote that one of the key virtues of a programmer is "laziness" -- of the variety where your unwillingness to perform rote actions inspires you to do the work to automate them.
Coders might have different backgrounds and political opinions, but nearly every one I've ever met found deep, almost soulful pleasure in taking something inefficient -- even just a little bit slow -- and tightening it up a notch. Removing the friction from a system is an aesthetic joy; coders' eyes blaze when they talk about making something run faster or how they eliminated some bothersome human effort from a process. This passion for efficiency isn't unique to software developers. Engineers and inventors have long been motivated by it. During the early years of industrialization, engineers elevated the automation of everyday tasks to a moral good. The engineer was humanity's "redeemer from despairing drudgery and burdensome labor," as Charles Hermany, an engineer himself, wrote in 1904.
[...] Many of today's programmers have their efficiency "aha" moment in their teenage years, when they discover that life is full of blindingly dull repetitive tasks and that computers are really good at doing them. (Math homework, with its dull litany of exercises, was one thing that inspired a number of coders I've talked to.) Larry Wall, who created the Perl programming language, and several coauthors wrote that one of the key virtues of a programmer is "laziness" -- of the variety where your unwillingness to perform rote actions inspires you to do the work to automate them.
Numerical Recipes in $LANGUAGE states it is written for scientist not coders because the difference is that scientists work on the next generation of problems on the last generation of computers (and hence need efficiency), while coders solve the last generation of problems on the next generation of computers (and thus make the code more elegant but less efficient).
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
You did something and you can measure that what you did, actually did it.
It is not like throwing a price to a customer and then he buys it. Perhaps he would have done that anyway. When you did the coding, you know that what you did was the cause of the improvement.
I know I have sat down for many hours, so a process can run 1 second faster and it runs once per week day. That is just over 5 minutes per year.
There is no way to defend spending so much time on it, except for ego.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Not only feel-good nonsense, but it makes a ridiculous generalization about "coders" as if they are some kind of special life form. Do "carpenters" have a primal urge to "kill inefficiency" because they use power tools?
Close. Carpenters have a primal urge to have more tools, thus the need to buy both hand tools and power tools. You can generalize this from carpenters to all woodworkers to most men quite accurately :-)
That's an interesting observation. I'll look for it.
I suppose I DO see it in programming tools, such as languages.
I do a lot of code review and mostly I see bad code and good code. Good code tends to be elegant and efficient. Bad code tends to be inelegant and inefficient. They tend to go hand-in-hand. Partly because mathematically they are sometimes correlated, and partly because those who write good code, write good code. I don't often see "good" as in "elegant" code that is also "bad" as is "inefficient".
I wonder though about whether programmers in general have that instinct, that desire, for efficiency, or if that's just the 10% who are particularly good at it. A lot of people do in fact write crap. Do they have a strong desire to do much better, but just don't know how to learn? I'm not sure. Maybe 30% of my teammates signed up for my last series of classes I taught, so those 30% indicate by their actions that they really want to improve.
* Talking about teaching classes sometimes makes people think I'm arrogant. I'm really, really bad at singing. Horrible. I can't play any video or board games. I can't draw for shit. I spend all my time learning about programming and designing information systems. I'm pretty good at that one thing.