Ask HN: Would you be inclined to share that moment of genius | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Would you be inclined to share that moment of genius

2 pointskhangtoh3 comments

I know many hackers here have experienced the moment when they are deep into hacking and in the middle of it wrote a block of code that they felt was just pure genius.

At that moment, tears rolled and cries of joy go on in the background, and after the celebratory moment is over, you go back into hacking.

But wait a minute, at that moment, did you had the urge to share your masterpiece, your creation, with hackers around the world? What if you could?

I know, there's pastie and we all love it. But pastie is unsociable. Hacker's are social beings, we love "social networks", so what I'm proposing is a social network pasties. A twitter for pastie, you follow your favorite hackers. You share code, you optimize code, you do pair programming ( the pastie way ).

Forget any web-based input methods. The way you share your code is through a command line program/script.( or any good methods that the community can come up with )

Does this sound fun to you? Want to get involved? Vote up if you think this is a good idea. Drop a comment if you got ideas or feedback to share!

Email me at hacksignal@gmail.com

I'm not a god of hacking by any means, so perhaps I've just rarely experienced true code-block Nirvana. But, in my experience, the beauty of software doesn't often arise from isolated, context-free blocks of code, just as it's hard to appreciate a great novel by cutting-and-pasting individual sentences and paragraphs.

The authors of programming books struggle with this problem all the time. A lot of what they have to say only makes sense in the context of projects that are longer than what a book can contain. They can't provide convincing real-world examples, so they are forced to rely on toy examples, which often fail to get the point across.

The pure-genius moments that I respect are the ones where the code blocks themselves are the most boring. When I first encountered (e.g.) jQuery, I realized I was in the presence of true genius. But I find that jQuery code is not very exciting reading, in and of itself. The typical line of jQuery is straightforward and transparent: It pretty much describes exactly what is going on, using idioms that you recognize from other languages (like CSS). The charm of well-written jQuery is that the individual statements are so straightforward that you can skim them -- you can look right past them and concentrate on the big picture, which is where all the important stuff is happening.

It's the assembly of your blocks of code into a marvelous, comprehensible large-scale structure that is the challenge of software. And it takes time to appreciate that. That's why the phrase "deep into hacking" contains the word deep. You have to live inside a problem for a while before its true structure -- and the elegance of the best solution -- becomes clear.

Of course, maybe all that I'm saying is that I'm not the intended audience for your proposed project. :) Other people, working on other tasks or with different languages or styles, might find it very useful!

"But, in my experience, the beauty of software doesn't often arise from isolated, context-free blocks of code, just as it's hard to appreciate a great novel by cutting-and-pasting individual sentences and paragraphs."

True, I have to agree with you that this applies in certain cases/languages.

Hoping to hear from everyone about this idea.

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