The Lazy Perfectionist

It’s been two years since we moved, and I’m just now unpacking my books.  What a great feeling.  Just about every book that came out of this box made me say, “Woo hoo!”

In Japan, each Shinkansen (bullet train) station has stores selling gift items with a theme that combines the Shinkansen and some local speciality. One of the official specialities in Gifu Prefecture is cormorant fishing, leading to the inevitable consequences:

What I love here is the absolute blind adherence to the pattern: this is a Shinkansen soup bowl for children; Gifu Prefecture’s speciality is cormorant fishing; ergo, the Shinkansen is cormorant fishing. Will the fishing boat hold the Shinkansen’s weight? Do Shinkansen eat fish? How is the Shinkansen holding onto the leashes? The artist doesn’t even try to solve any of these problems: the leashes just come up to the Shinkansen and end.

Wow.

When I was studying Japanese, a good part of that work was pretty arbitrary: kanji are practically random, vocabulary is essentially arbitrary (although neither of those are quite true, it takes quite a bit of investment before they begin to bear fruit). Rote memorization wasn’t only the cornerstone of my efforts; it was the better part of them.

But I always enjoyed it. I grumbled, but I never got so annoyed with the project that I felt like it wasn’t worthwhile. With a world of things I could have studied, I never felt like the Japanese language really had to justify the investment. I took it in stride.

My attitude towards some of my work is very different. I read people’s code, and think, this is just pointless. They could have done a nice job here, actually captured these ideas in a clean way, but they couldn’t be bothered, and now it’s up to me to wade through their half-baked mumbling and make some change that I’ve almost forgotten the reason for.

Is it possible to enjoy the challenges of mediocre code in the way that one enjoys the study of a spoken language? They’re similar artifacts, in the sense of being shaped more by the need to actually work than by the need for clarity or consistency.