After the thread "A Matter of Style", and numerous threads about TIMTOWTDI, I pose the following

How do you view your code building process? How do you view your data structures, design role, program flow, etc...?

There are the people who say programming is a science like engineering, others say it's more of an art, while yet others state it lies inbetween. I'm not so interested in where a monk thinks it falls in that scale, but rather how they go about preparing themselves for a project, how they view thier thought process of data correlation into a final product.

With a language as free form as perl, you sometimes can get a decent view into how people view their problem space, or data structures by the code they write. Other times a few lines may be nothing more than slightly intelligible gibberish, as people delve into globs, built in vars, and deep magic optimizations

For me it has always been slightly closer to an alchemical process. Taking raw/impure base items, purfiying until I am satisfied with each items state, pushing it all through a some process (whether simple or complex), and producing a new item, which is usually greater than the sum of the components.

What is it like for you? Do you view variables as containers or simply some type of way to get your data back from the void which is memeory?

/* And the Creator, against his better judgement, wrote man.c */

In reply to How do you view programming by l2kashe

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