The hacker’s mentality is like that of the painter who spends months on a portrait in order to produce a beautiful but imperfect likeness, marked with his own personal style, which few can replicate and people pay a lot for. The mathematical approach is to take a photo because someone figured out how to perfectly reproduce images on paper over a hundred years ago and I just want a picture, dammit, but the camera’s manual is in Lojban.
IMO, the mathematical approach is essentially always better for software; nearly every problem that the industry didn’t inflict upon itself was solved by some egghead last century. But there is a kind of joy in creating pointless difficulties at enormous cost in order to experience the satisfaction of overcoming them without recourse to others, I suppose.
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The hacker’s mentality is like that of the painter who spends months on a portrait in order to produce a beautiful but imperfect likeness, marked with his own personal style, which few can replicate and people pay a lot for. The mathematical approach is to take a photo because someone figured out how to perfectly reproduce images on paper over a hundred years ago and I just want a picture, dammit, but the camera’s manual is in Lojban.
IMO, the mathematical approach is essentially always better for software; nearly every problem that the industry didn’t inflict upon itself was solved by some egghead last century. But there is a kind of joy in creating pointless difficulties at enormous cost in order to experience the satisfaction of overcoming them without recourse to others, I suppose.