On writing software the way you write a song

There’s a moment in songwriting — usually around 2am with a half-cold cup of tea — when the thing stops being a collection of parts and becomes a thing. A unit. You stop hearing the guitar and the bass and the words separately. You hear the song.

I’ve been chasing that moment in software for fifteen years, and I think I finally understand what it is.

The clinical fallacy

Software engineering culture is obsessed with correctness. Tests pass or they don’t. Complexity is measured, dependencies are graphed, coverage is tracked to the decimal. This is good. I’m not arguing against it. But somewhere in that culture, a certain kind of taste got left out.

The taste for when a system clicks.

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