andthennothing.net

A large part of my profession (programmer) is about patterns, or rather lack thereof, at least if you ask me. When you’re tracking down a bug in vast amounts of code I think it’s beneficial to be sensitive to breaks in the patterns, to instinctively flinch when you browse over a mistake. I think I’m rather good at detecting inconsistencies, and I enjoy it, but it has its drawbacks.

One drawback is when I read (often informal) text. There are a few things I’m allergic to. Like “a quote with the dot inside the citation marks.” (Although I think that it’s the “correct” way). Or when there’s a smiley inside parentheses when there is no closing parenthesis, (like this :-). Ghaa, I know that most people don’t care, but I cannot parse sentences like that, and have an enormous itch to move the dot and add a paranthesis.

When there’s a mess in the stuff I’m working with it’s hard. Like the other day when I was about to update a large Word document with multiple authors. I opened the “formatting sidebar” (don’t know exactly what it’s called since I don’t have Word installed at home) and there was a mess with the used formats (you know copy-pasted text from other documents, and a lot of special formatting in different places without using the predefined/user specified formats). When the mess was cleaned up, I could start do the real work.

I also can’t read/write text where code/identifiers (such as class names etc) aren’t formatted using a monospaced font. Impossible.

The same goes for code of course (I actually deal more with code than Word, which is a good thing :-) ) (<—see, this is how I want smilies in parentheses to be written). I can stand some messiness, not everything has to be to my liking. But there’s a threshold. Sometimes I cannot just fix a small defect, patching a patchwork, but I have to clean up (or in worst case, rewrite). Don’t get me wrong, I’m not pedantic, I can stand a lot of messy desks, appartement and so on, but not in code/text.

Another example is a Swedish song called “Alla vill till himmeln men ingen vill dö” (everyone wants to go to heaven but no one wants to die). It’s a great song, but Timbuktu (the artist) never mentions that line in the song, instead he sings/raps “alla vill till himmelen men få vill ju dö” (everyone wants to go to heaven but just a few wants to die). Annoying. Great song, but annoying title.

So that’s my rant for today. PatternDisturbanceSensibilityDisorder can be a pain at times. It can be wasteful at times. But, I think it makes me a better programmer. It’s just a matter of controlling it, to be able to turn it off in order to get some real work done.