A hotspot is code with high development activity and frequent churn. What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten yens is to make political writing into an art. As a very small child I used to imagine that I was, say, Robin Hood, and picture myself as the hero of thrilling adventures, but quite soon my story ceased to be narcissistic in a crude way and became more and more a mere description of what I was doing and the things I saw. Not only will this make life simpler for my colleagues; my future self is going to love me as well. The problem of language is subtler and would take too long to discuss. They are: 1) Sheer egoism. I walk like Eugene Aram; And the commissar is telling my fortune A shopping list? It's code that's worked on often, and hence code that has to be read and understood frequently, potentially by multiple authors. Read them all, then write your own articles modeled after them. When I was about sixteen I suddenly discovered the joy of mere words, i.e. The code health metric doesn't care about the subjective stuff, like coding style or if a public constructor should lack a comment, but instead aims to catch the properties of code that really matter for maintainability. So I take care in designing the code, and I often start by refactoring the existing solution to get a better starting point. The eunuch without a harem; For Duggie always pays. I am the worm who never turned, But there is also the minority of gifted, wilful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, or in some perverse mood: but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write. We all have our own reasons for why we write, and many are essential to accomplishing our daily plans, not to mention achieving our dreams. etc. This correctness perspective is the main reason why I would like to put the Boy Scout Rule into context too; should we really be boy scouting code in the long tail? It's all about using data to guide when and where to invest in higher code quality, and how it can be a long-term saving to compromise it. I wasnt born for an age like this; CodeScene's Code Health metric was heavily researched and designed precisely for estimating how hard code would be for a human to understand. George Orwell From The Penguin Essay of G.Orwell, Penguin Book, London, 1984. Could make my enemies tremble. We don't use first-party cookies but we have advertisements, so you can have third-party ones. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. We maim our joys or hide them; A critic whom I respect read me a lecture about it. Sure,the code may still be hard to understand, but what is there is likely to have been debugged into functionality. Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. which do not now seem to me so very wonderful, sent shivers down my backbone; and the spelling hee for he was an added pleasure. the sounds and associations of words. However, throughout this time I did in a sense engage in literary activities. I had the lonely childs habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. Here's an example from React.js, and a link to the interactive hotspot map: The interesting thing with hotspots is that they make up a relatively minor part of the code, often just 1-3% of the total code size. Let's start by uncovering the motivation for investing in code quality. 3) Historical impulse. By nature taking your nature to be the state you have attained when you are first adult I am a person in whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth. Since the code is worked on so often, the additional costs in understanding the code and in making sure it doesn't break, multiply quickly. Pleasure in the impact or one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. There are so many different ways to understand not only the why of writing, but what one gets out of it. Between the priest and the commissar Let's start by uncovering the motivation for investing in code quality. That is, you can take on technical debt strategically. However, that small portion of the code tends to attract an unproportional amount of development activity. etc. Really expensive. Then came Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, etc. It has become sort of an informal process and safety-net that guides me in my day job. I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five 4) Political purpose using the word political in the widest possible sense. And yet ii is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface ones own personality. In fact, most of our development time is spent trying to understand existing code just so that we know how to change it. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us. I believe this is a common habit of children and adolescents. This habit continued till I was about twenty-five, right through my non-literary years. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude. To me, code quality is all about understandability. From time to time, when I was a bit older, I wrote bad and usually unfinished nature poems in the Georgian style. Code quality only matters in context. When I reason about code, I'm not only looking at the code. For example, when working on code in the long tail I might realize that my new code is similar to some existing responsibility. For the past ten years, weve seen hundreds of thousands of people share their responses and engage in activities around the theme of #WhyIWrite. So hee with difficulty and labour hard All these are a dream. My experience indicates that I'm in good company here; a lot of us developers spend so much time growing our programming skills, and that kind of drive comes from intrinsic motivation. Review your research and notes. National Council of Teachers of English - All Rights Reserved. It is humbug to pretend that this is not a motive, and a strong one. Although I had to search, and did search, for the right words, I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside. Let me give just one example of the cruder kind of difficulty that arises. My book about the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia, is, of course, a frankly political book, but in the main it is written with a certain detachment and regard for form. In that section, I reference research that compares modules of different age. The Spanish war and other events in 1936-7 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. In tristitia hilaris, in hilaritate tristis. I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on either side, and I barely saw my father before I was eight. But girls bellies and apricots, It is forbidden to dream again; Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen in short, with the whole top crust of humanity: The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. We all have our own reasons for why we write, and many are essential to accomplishing our daily plans, not to mention achieving our dreams. I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their sound. And this is where it gets interesting. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer. At eleven, when the war of 1914-18 broke out, I wrote a patriotic poem which was printed in the local newspaper, as was another, two years later, on the death of Kitchener. It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write. It's been a real game changer that I'm taking full advantage of. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. On the other hand, once I work in hotspots, I'm well aware that the code will be worked on again; the best prediction of future activity is the code's history. I remember a little poem that I wrote at that date, expressing my dilemma: But the priest has promised an Austin Seven. This increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working classes, and the job in Burma had given me some understanding of the nature of imperialism: but these experiences were not enough to give me an accurate political orientation. This implies that any code quality issues or technical debt in the hotspots, however minor, are likely to be expensive. It can be seen how these various impulses must war against one another, and how they must fluctuate from person to person and from time to time. Should some code slide down and decline in health, then that might be a sign I've gone too far and need to pay down the accumulated debt. Two hundred years ago, But could it also be a viable long-term saving? NCTE acknowledges the support of the National Writing Project, National Novel Writing Month, the Teaching Channel, and the Learning Network of The New York Times, who are also collaborators on the National Day on Writing. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it. Plus, I spend so much time writing for my job that I waaant to talk about writing sometimes, because I spend like 70% of my day thinking about writing; I spend much more time thinking about the art of writing than I do thinking about, say, Batman, so why not write articles about writing in addition to writing articles about, say, Batman. To make it actionable, I run these checks in a CI/CD pipeline (you can read more on how this works on my other blog). Why I Write (George Orwell-1947) From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. The lines from Paradise Lost. Anyone can write something, post it, and call it an article in the information age, the definition of an article has become a very blurred line. I do think that the movement has pushed our industry in a good direction. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once you have that knowledge, you can start to use technical debt in its original sense. Since we cannot know up front if our code will be modified again or not, we learn to err on the safe side; better to make all code as clean as possible. Using hotspots, you can ensure it stays that way. Here's how: occasionally, I need to expand or tweak a feature that's been stable for a long time, so I find myself operating in the long tail of change frequencies. And later still the times were good, Code stabilizes for different reasons. One might be that it's dead code, which means it can be safely deleted (always a win). Tell us why YOU write. Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse politics] purpose and artistic purpose into one whole. Knowing the health of your code -- at any time -- is key. And the clergy are all clean-shaven. It should, at least in a world where business factors like time to market matter. When using the code health metric, I also tend to emphasize trends over absolute values. By the end of 7935 I had still failed to reach a firm decision. It's been battle tested and it just works. Were you? It turns out that there's a correlation between old, stable code and correctness. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. My point is simply that good is contextual. The key concept I use for code quality decisions is hotspots. For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I use this to put a quality bar on any code that I touch. Yes, there's truly no limit to the sins I commit. The National Day on Writing (October 20), an initiative of the National Council of Teachers of English, is built on the premise that writing is critical to literacy but needs greater attention and celebration. And the more one is conscious of ones political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing ones aesthetic and intellectual integrity. But side by side with all this, for fifteen years or more, I was carrying out a literary exercise of a quite different kind: this was the making up of a continuous story about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind. But I only compromise quality in the long tail, and I only do it if I estimate that it will save me time. So it is clear what kind of books I wanted to write, in so far as I could be said to want to write books at that time. Their collective voices are raising the volume on this issue. In any case I find that by the time you have perfected any style of writing, you have always outgrown it. To celebrate the National Day on Writing, the NWP has joined The New York Times Learning Network and Figment to collect the thoughts of people from In a peaceful age I might have written .ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. An email? Our primary task is to read code, and the easier our code is to reason about, the cheaper it is to modify. His subject-matter will be determined by the age he lives in at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. I give all this background information because I do not think one can assess a writers motives without knowing something of his early development. I know the code health of each module in the codebase where I work thanks to CodeScene. I have used hotspot analyses in my daily work for the past 10 years. Would that change how you write that code? When operating in the long tail, I might not put the full effort into making the code easily testable, but I do like to leave a test as a safety-net for my future self. Clearly such a chapter, which after a year or two would lose its interest for any ordinary reader, must ruin the book. But the priest has promised an Austin Seven, Surrealist, humorous and romantic character. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc. We developers don't really write code. With his right hand in his pocket he moved across to the window. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. Stable code usually represent stable parts of the domain too. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, I am going to produce a work of art. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. That's where the costs come. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked apolitical purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally. Wont you join the conversation? Then came Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, etc. A text message? Apart from school work, I wrote vers doccasion, semi-comic poems which I could turn out at what now seems to me astonishing speed at fourteen I wrote a whole rhyming play, in imitation of Aristophanes, in about a week and helped to edit school magazines, both printed and in manuscript. 8. We rocked our troubled thoughts to sleep The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us. I dont want to leave that as the final impression. Code quality is a broad and ill-defined concept. 4) Political purpose using the word political in the widest possible sense. Horses, ducks in flight at dawn, We were so easy to please, I am not able, and I do not want, completely to abandon the world-view that I acquired in childhood. Read examples of news and feature articles from the Scholastic Kids Press Corps. It can be seen how these various impulses must war against one another, and how they must fluctuate from person to person and from time to time. I also, about twice, attempted a short story which was a ghastly failure. That way we avoid unpleasant future surprises. What did you write today? My book about the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia, is, of course, a frankly It raises problems of construction and of language, and it raises in a new way the problem of truthfulness. This increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working classes, and the job in Burma had given me some understanding of the nature of imperialism: but these experiences were not enough to give me an accurate political orientation. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. I used to obsess about code quality earlier in my career. All code isn't equal. Finally, I tend to write a test for most new code. As for the need to describe things, I knew all about it already. Down in the street a tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf, etc. It raises problems of construction and of language, and it raises in a new way the problem of truthfulness. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. I will only say that of later years I have tried to write less picturesquely and more exactly. That research finds that a module which is a year older than a similar module has roughly one-third fewer defects. The joys we now dissemble; It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. Even if you dont need to write on a deadline, set deadlines for yourself. With that reservation, I will claim that doing a quick and dirty solution is almost always a faster short-term solution (before you burn the heretic, please note that I emphasized short-term). The lines from Paradise Lost. Youve turned what might have been a good book into journalism. What he said was true, but I could not have done otherwise. I have just as much interest in understanding its temporal characteristics and trends, which is data we can mine from version-control history. He's the founder of Empear where he designs the CodeScene tool for software analysis. While the radio plays, Then jot down ideas for the following six sections. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. The greenfinch on the apple bough The story must, I suppose, have reflected the styles of the various writers I admired at different ages, but so far as I remember it always had the same meticulous descriptive quality. With his right hand in his pocket he moved across to the window. To preach upon eternal doom In this article I want to share the heuristics I use to decide when high-quality code is called for, and when we can let it slip. From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. I dreamed I dwelt in marble halls, And if you balance the amount of debt you take on based on the hotspot criteria, then it might even become an interest free loan. A check? So I copy-paste the original and tweak the copy to do what I want. In a peaceful age I might have written .ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. And little fat men shall ride them. Summary: The urge to write can be a mysterious calling. I wrote my first poem at the age of four or five, my mother taking it down to dictation. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. A chapter of your book? Why I write is an essay by the renowned writer and essayist George Orwell, as the title of the essay suggests, it is an explanatory essay which focuses on the writer himself and his motives for writing, the essay is written in a plain and simple style and lacks any strong rhetorical devices or literary techniques. I cannot remember anything about it except that it was about a tiger and the tiger had chair-like teeth -a good enough phrase, but I fancy the poem was a plagiarism of Blakes Tiger, Tiger.
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