Design vs. Code
Today I discovered and took Andy Rutledge’s little designer quiz. I got only two questions wrong, and one of them I knew the answer but got wrong on purpose (triangles suck!). But this doesn’t mean I’m a designer. It simply means that I’ve been immersed in design ideas for the past year. If I had taken the quiz a year or two ago, I would have gotten most of the questions wrong.
It’s nice to see some validation that my mind is expanding, but sometimes I worry about whether all of this “fluff” is causing me to loosen grasp of my past strengths. Another post I discovered today is this little bit on printing floats in Erlang. It appeared to me that this was the exact opposite of the designer mentality; getting *exactly* the right bit of code needed to do something like print a number. So pedestrian, but so familiar. I thought back to the times when Derek Denny-Brown and Andy Kimball were rewriting our number formatting routines for System.Xml, and back to the times I’d needed to do the same for CAD, accounting, or other systems years earlier. I looked at the Erlang source, and it took me back to when I did the same implementation in scheme. It warms my heart to see that people still care about things like this.