Every Line Of Code That You Write Is An Explicit Decision To Make The Application Better Or Worse

The other day, I was watching the new Hannah Gadsby comedy special  (which is great, by the way), when something she said about Art got me thinking about Programming. She was pointing out that every aspect of a painting  reflected an explicit decision  made by the painter. Nothing in a painting happens by accident  - every color, every arrangement, every stroke of the brush is a calculated part of the final portrait. For me, programming in JavaScript or ColdFusion or SQL is exactly the same thing. Every comment I put in the code, every character I write, every expression that I wrap in parenthesis is a calculated decision intended to make the application better .

** My feelings about this are very strong**. It’s why I reject the “formatting” aspects of linting. It’s why I’ll never be a Golang programmer who feels the need to run gofmt. It’s why I’ll never use Prettier. It’s why I’ll never create an .editorconfig file. It’s why I’ll never run a command that ends in --fix. It’s why I’ll never have anything automatically change my code when I hit CMD+S.

Because, I’ve already made all of those decisions while I was writing the code.

Part of why I wanted to write this post is because, earlier this week, I had to write an if-statement in ColdFusion. And, the formatting for this if-statement wasn’t immediately clear in my mind. I had to pause for a moment and think about what would make the code easiest to understand and maintain.

#coldfusion #javascript / dhtml #sql #work