“I poisoned my own mind.”

More and more programmers are writing retrospectives like this — and a huge THANK YOU to Elissa for doing so — where they discover that Programming Is Not Special.

It is particularly interesting to read this from a solo game developer who is both a programmer and an artist, who began by thinking the programing isn’t art, and discovered by an emotionally torturous process that it actually is.

@glyph There's a lot of antipatterns now known about programmers taking decisions to manage their otherwise untreated ADHD.

I wonder how many decisions in programming are made in order to ward off the emotional torture.
Is the large amount of ugly code because people don't want to admit that code could be an art?

@riley @glyph Developing aesthetic sense certainly means developing the capacity to find something painful!...

Awkwardly, we really don't collectively share the same tastes in code.