What's in a name?

There’s always heated babbling (err…babeling) on the cyberspace to assign metaphor to our embryonic field of building digital things: writing or engineering or accretion. One thing for sure, humans have a religious proclivity to conquistador in the bikeshed when faced with terra incognita. Perhaps, ironically, because it’s something of a science and therefore seems to ask for a pinning down. But these guys, some of us, just seem unable to leave it alone to variance; to let it lie under a broad, mercurial atmospheric plane of something like creating.

I remember when I attended my first Railsconf in 2014. In the opening keynote DHH made a todo about software writing (and more famously that TDD was dead).

Hello, World!

Fucking comma in there. You have an author-face.

At that time, 2014 in Chi-city (my place of birth), I was too green building product to really care what you called what I was doing. (Maybe I’ll never actually care that much.) It wouldn’t have helped me get a quicker handle on the revealing module pattern.

And then, a couple days later in the closing keynote, Aaron Patterson rebukes the writing metaphor and talks about the advanced engineering of improving Rails 4 query performance. Did they do that on purpose?

What’s in a name? Sigh, we don’t have the luxury of poetic soliloquy when getting business done and keeping this company afloat. Shitty code smells like shit no matter what you call it. I’m not gonna care too much for now what the pontificators put on the LHS.

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