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Comment by frereubu | Hacker News Reader

This, and the current “sober” posts on r/ExperiencedDevs, makes me think of Herodotus describing the way the Persians made important decisions - once sober, once drunk, and if the drunk and sober decisions were the same they knew it was a good one.

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Reminds me of Hemingway's "Write drunk, edit sober."

Not for code tho. I've never seen booze help make good code

There was an old xkcd about this, though I will admit I have never experienced this:

https://xkcd.com/323/

Oh the Ballmer peak definitely exists for POCs, school work and side projects. A couple beers in and then you lose the fear of doing something stupid and start cranking out code.

Not sure about producfion code though, the values are different

I'll admit to banging out v0.0.0 code with a buzz. Mostly it's comments and shit-code as documentation. Sober eyes and test cases before production.

So maybe write drunk, edit sober does work

Write drunk, test sober?

Sort of a guilty secret but I used to save POC work for right after a company talk or party and a few beers. I could spew out a few hundred lines of code that was a bit messy but was got the job done. I’d go over it and clean it all up the next morning. Almost always an incredibly productive exercise for me but ymmv.

Alcohol really does not help me with code either (except maybe a relaxing beer), but Marijuhana works(occasionally). But you really, really need to do the sober clean up part. Otherwise it becomes a mess.

I cannot work while stoned - velocity drops to a crawl, and any complexity becomes overwhelming. And dealing with colleagues becomes much more difficult.

I can code with a few drinks in me; in fact the activity of coding seems to reduce the amount I drink (I'm a functioning alcoholic).

It's decades since I drank during working hours. In my early career in the City, it was the custom to drink at lunchtime. Those days are passed.

In college, being drunk once helped me figure out an issue with some PostScript code I was writing.

I find “write sober, review drunk” to be much better advice.

https://theuserisdrunk.com/

Write code drunk, write tests sober?

The Persians also have an expression for "drunkenness and truthfulness", masti o rasti. مستی و راستی

There’s also Pliny the Elder, in vino veritas (in wine there's truth, for the non-classicists in the audience).

I think Tacitus had a similar anecdote about the Germans.

(Even without getting drunk, I've always found it useful to consider a hard decision once analytically and once intuitively, and if I don't agree with myself, think about it some more.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_vino_veritas Is the phrase. Useful if you want to appear cultured at a company party.

This is right for the drunken dev thoughts, but not for the Herodotus example. "In vino veritas" - in wine there is truth - means that people expose their true thoughts when they're drunk rather than the filtered version they might present when sober, but the story of the Persians is more about the fact that there's value in considering both drunk and sober reactions, particularly when they tally.

In Hebrew we have "נכנס יין - יצא סוד", loosely translates to "Wine entered - secret came out".

or "children and drunks tell the truth"

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