Daniel Pritchett

Enterprise collaboration blogger, Business Intelligence developer, father, husband. These are my stories.

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Jun 22

“You can reach a point with Lisp where, between the conceptual simplicity, the large libraries, and the customization of macros, you are able to write only code that matters. And, once there, you are able to achieve a very high degree of focus, such as you would when playing Go, or playing a musical instrument, or meditating. And then, as with those activities, there can be a feeling of elation that accompanies that mental state of focus.” Interview with Rich Hickey in Code Quarterly

Feb 3

“Writing clever (or sometimes ugly) code is also described as hacking. In this case the hacker is violating the rules of how we expect software to be written. If there’s a project that should take months to write, and someone manages to hack it out in a single evening, that’s a small miracle, and a major hack. If the result is simple and beautiful because the hacker discovered a better solution, we may describe the hack as “elegant” or “brilliant”. If the result is complex and hard to understand (perhaps it violates many layers of abstraction), then we will call it an “ugly hack”. Ugly hacks aren’t all bad though — one of my favorite personal hacks was some messy code that demonstrated what would become AdSense (story here[1]), and although the code was quickly discarded, it did it’s job.” Paul Buchheit, Applied Philosophy a.k.a. ‘Hacking’

Apr 3