A Manefestation of my Understanding

When I code, I only code what I know. How could it be otherwise?

If I were writing out mysterious instructions that I am clueless about, I’d never be able to tell if they did or did not do what people wanted them to do. I could blindly follow some loose specification, but the inevitable typos and inherent vagueness would force the code to drift far from what is desired. I’d have no sense of direction on how to get it back on track.

So, before I code, I learn. I learn about the tech I am using, and I learn about the problems that people need solving. I try to learn about the state of the art and the different ways other people have solved similar problems.

I take all of this learning and use it to craft the instructions. I put it out there, first in testing, and use any feedback to fix both unintentional problems and learning ones. Sometimes, I just didn't fully get all of the ramifications of some combination of the topics. Opps.

In that way, any and all of the code I lay out in editors, for the various different internal and external parts of the software that I will release, are very much manifestations of what I know, who I am, and what I believe.

Which is to say that the work is not coding, it is learning. Code is the result of that knowledge I acquired, not some arbitrary arrangement of instructions.

This is no different than writers for magazines and newspapers. They do some amount of research and investigative journalism, then they craft articles intended to communicate the things that they, too, have learned.

They might be constrained by style guides and ethical concerns to write out what they know in a certain way so that it fits in with the larger publication, but their writing is still their expression of what they know. Their personality is still imprinted on it. It might be edited quite a bit by others, which may pull it away somewhat from their original effort or focus, but ultimately, in the end, it is still mostly a manifestation of them.

People who try to disconnect code from the thinking of the programmers do so because they don’t like having to accommodate the programmers' needs. They want programmers to be mindless clerks who blindly grind out endless code. We see all sorts of movements in the software industry that express this view, but it is not and will never be the case. If you have a huge series of instructions that is intended to do something specific, then someone has to understand what those instructions are. They are too precise and pedantic for people flying at higher levels to belt out in pictures or general descriptions. To work as needed, they need that deep level of correctness to be there. You can’t skip past that, so you can’t skip past programmers, and at least you should respect them enough to understand that their works are actually manifestations of themselves.

You can’t unbind code from its authors. It just isn’t possible, until maybe AGI. If you need some complex code that does something precise, then you need some people to fully, completely, and totally understand exactly what those instructions do, and why they are correct and precise.

In that sense, everything that I coded from scratch is an extension of my personality. It is written all over the work. Maybe if I do some little hacks to someone else’s code, there is little trace of my personality there, but if it is a large, unified block of code that I wrote, not only is it me that wrote it, but if you looked at it carefully and you knew me, you’d know that I was the one who wrote it. We leave a lot of ourselves behind in our code; we have no choice in that.

I get that it is inconvenient to some management who wants to claim all of the credit for our work, but they are just self-absorbed. They can’t hide stuff from me; I have to know it all in order for the code to live up to its usefulness. I might not care why we are solving a given set of problems, but I can not do even a reasonable job if I am blindfolded. They can’t just chuck me away afterwards and think that it will all continue on as normal. Replacing me with a kid that doesn’t know anything yet is cheaper, but also grossly ineffective. It will take a long time for the kid to learn what I did over the decades I spent doing it. Then it will be their code and a manifestation of who they are, so the problem persists.