Spurious Logic

Coding in the "Zone"

I've heard a certain amount of talk in relation to coding in the "Zone" which is seen as overall positive thing. It's tied to the same thing in sport or games, where your mind and body are perfectly focussed and you aren't thinking about what you're doing. It's just the right thing to do and it just works right.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what others mean when they're talking about the zone but to me this is a terrible way to do software developement. Don't get me wrong, it's great for fast prototyping or fun projects that you won't be supporting later on, but if you're not able to explain or justify a decision at the time then coming back a few days, weeks or months later and trying to work out what you were thinking at the time, well good luck.

A lot of the talk about this gung ho programming is focussed purely on the code. That's great but if you're not documenting (internal comments or external notes) then you're creating a hole of difficult logic that takes unnecessary time to decipher.

I'm sure there's some REAL MEN programmers out there who really believe "If it was hard to code then it should be hard to understand", but you know what? Screw that. Good code is easy to understand. Don't try to be smart. Don't try to do something clever or unusual. Just do what's required, efficiently and clearly. Unless you're working in a crazily constrained execution envrionment (embedded devices) or are planning to scale up massively (google/digg...) then you really don't need to do anything convoluted...