Imitation and Repetition

I was recently reading Alice Cooper, Golf Monster: A Rock 'n' Roller's 12 Steps to Becoming a Golf Addict and had an epiphany. In one of the chapters Alice talks about the way to be great at anything. He explains one should mimic the greats by watching and then repeat what they do until it's natural. I immediately started to think about programming, of course. We all have programmers that we admire. For me, most of my admired heros are great writers. It's their advice that I adore. I soak their words in and then practice what they talk about. But, it's not the same as reading code. What Alice was talking about was studying what the greats do and repeating it until it's as natural as the way you breathe. Where can we find great code? I always felt my programming took a huge leap forward with Smalltalk. The reason I think that is now crystal clear: Smalltalk encourages you to read other people's code. All of the tools embrace reading code. If you don't know how to do something, you can search via the tools to find something similar and then repeat what they did. There is a plethora of patterns and good programming in any Smalltalk system. All of the GoF patterns came from Smalltalk originally.

That's fine and dandy, but what about Java, Python, Ruby, or other developers? It's just as easy as finding an open source framework you love and diving head first into the code. Study it, practice writing in that style, and repeat until it feels natural. Open source gives us opportunities that only Smalltalk and Lisp did in the past: a limitless supply of software to study in any language we choose. But, this begs the question: How do I know I'm studying good code? Alice touches on this in his book by saying that as you pass milestones in competence, you know what the next level looks like. Start with code that looks good to you now and keep practicing. For me, I strive for readability. How can I remove all noise until the code I write is nothing but the language of the problem I'm trying to solve. I'm always reading code to find new techniques for removing noise. I study code written in different languages and see how I can apply any new techniques in the language I am currently using. I've found a lot of gems by studying from functional programming and applying them to object-oriented languages.

This brings up another interesting observation. If it's good to read code and practice writing it, when should you use a new technique? For me, I always practice a new technique a lot before I apply it to production code. Normally, once a technique feels natural and I know it like the back of my hand. Most of the open source libraries I've written have been to explore an idea that I saw somewhere else to play around with it. There's nothing worse than not having mastery and immediately applying it because it was new at the time. Be patient. Read, code, repeat. Always be reading and practicing. It's the only way to get better.