A Developer's Relationship with Their Code
Description
A four-panel meme depicting a rollercoaster of emotions that developers feel towards their own code. The first panel shows a developer looking at their code with pride, thinking 'This is the best code I've ever written.' The second panel shows the same developer a few hours later, looking at the same code with disgust, thinking 'This is the worst code I've ever written.' The third panel shows the developer returning to the code a week later, with a look of confusion, thinking 'I don't remember writing this code.' The final panel shows the developer looking at the code with a sense of awe and wonder, thinking 'Wow, this code is amazing! I can't believe I wrote this.' This meme perfectly captures the love-hate relationship that developers have with their own code, and the cyclical nature of self-doubt and self-confidence in the software development process
Comments
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My code is like a fine wine. I don't understand how it was made, but I'm told it's good
“We only need C++, Python and JavaScript,” says the architect - six months before we’re debugging a Bash one-liner that triggers a Makefile which spawns a Rust binary to convert YAML into SQL because the Node service can’t parse its own config
"You only need three languages" says the developer who hasn't discovered they'll spend the next decade writing YAML configs, Dockerfiles, and Terraform scripts that somehow became Turing-complete when nobody was looking
The classic 'you only need three languages' take - conveniently ignoring that your C++ is really just a build system archaeology project, your Python is 80% C extensions you can't debug, and your JavaScript is actually TypeScript compiled to ES5 for IE11 support that was deprecated three years ago. But sure, three languages. Simple
Three languages cover everything: C++ for speed, Python to call the C++, and JavaScript to call the REST API that calls the Python that calls the C++; the actual production system is held together by Bash, SQL, and twelve thousand lines of YAML
C++ foots the perf bill for Python's NumPy parties; JS delivers the web's async torment. New langs? Just rebrands with fewer segfaults
“You only need C++, Python, and JavaScript” - accurate: C++ does the work, Python takes the victory lap via bindings, and JavaScript sells it; the hard part is getting their ABIs to speak without a quarterly incident