The Narcissism of Small Code Differences (2008)
So, as a programmer with at least "a lot" of experience (these things are hard to judge, especially among folks here), I'm trying to extract some learning from this.<p>I'm not at all sure about my classification. Probably somewhere between Librarian and Purist, perhaps (but these things feel somewhat harder to apply when most of the code is in C).<p>Should I fight the urge to re-write code that I see as broken, since it's just me wanting to re-shape the code in my image? That's emotionally somewhat difficult (bad code hurts the eyes) but certainly doable, but it also seems a bit counter-productive since I really think there can be some value in sharing experience. It's also, of course (?) hard to really believe that it's all narcissism, to me bad code feels objectively bad. If that even makes sense.<p>I guess it boils down to "co-operation is hard" for me, right now. :)