Carpenter and the Ivory Tower

Long time ago there was a small village of carpenters building all kinds of furniture. All carpenters of the village we're lead by a wise leading council. All council men lived in a shiny Ivory tower built in the middle of the village.

In their wast wisdom the council had decided an optimal set of tools quite well suitable to all kinds of constructions, from simple shelves to ornate thrones ordered by kings world wide.

For a long time all the carpenters we're happy to construct whatever requested, using fine tools provided to them by the council. Not knowing of anything better they felt that for sure it was a good thing that everyone used the same tools. How else they could they continue serving their clients and fix a broken chair constructed by someone else?

Then one day one of the carpenters purchased a screwdriver and a box of screws from a travelling peddler. The tool was extremely nicely crafted and it fitted his hand perfectly. Formerly all they had had we're hammer, nails and some glue. So even better it provided him a new way to make even sturdier furniture where they we're needed and made it easier to fix them as the screws could be easily opened.

Soon the village was buzzing with the news. What was this new tool? Could it really build reliable pieces of furniture? Why waste time learning to use it as the old ways we're good enough. No clients could possibly trust chairs built with these strange screws, those thread seemed so thin that they must break easily. Besides using this screwdriver seemed to be awfully complicated.

The buzz was even heard on the top of the tower. Hearing the news wise men became worried. How could we trust this new thing? We have no one competent in it's usage. And so they decided to mandate usage of the old tools. They had proven themselves.

For a while all but that one carpenter, who had already got accustomed to his screwdriver continued happily. But slowly they started to notice losing clients. First it was just some farmers not buying anything from them any more, but after some years almost no orders came in. Villagers astonished. Our carpenters are the most competent hammer users anywhere, how could anyone not buy from us?

As it was, another village had started to accumulate carpenters, not specialized in some particular tools, but instead keen on finding the best tools to serve their clients. And now armed with their assortment of nonuniform tools they we're building better and more beautiful furniture faster than villagers ever had. And so slowly but surely the village of carpenters and their already smudgy ivory tower perished in the lack of clients.

Express yourself

"Both essays and lines of code are meant - before all else - to be read and understood by human beings." - Treating Code as an Essay, Yukihiro Matsumoto

 Some time ago i read this sentence from book called Beautiful Code. And it felt extremely correct. Many problems i had encountered as a software engineer did indeed rise from the fact that it was extremely hard for a human being to read the code. It didn't express it's creators idea, nor what it hoped to accomplish. Sometimes this lack of expression was patched with comments, more often not even that.

 Also my explorations outside of my cozy home in Java world lead me to think of programming in a whole different way than i used to. It seemed i had finally found the ability to really express my thoughts in code. I started to feel being able to really pour my thoughts about a problem at hand straight to the source code i was writing.

 So this all lead to the fact that i had again a lot to say in some form. And again i chose Blogging. Starting this blog in no way means that I've abandoned the old one. Just that I felt that these matters are so much more technically oriented that they deserved a separate blog. Time will show how actively I'll be able to  express my thoughts here.