Note: I am a Java programmer and my theme music genre of choice is, obviously, heavy metal. Your mileage may differ depending on your choice of programming language, music genre, or maybe just because I'm fucked up in the head department. Also, this is not describing any particular program - I rather doubt a single program would incorporate databases, intense graphics and text i/o...This does not reflect the realities of bottom-up design or anything your teacher taught you in CS 101
We start with
importing the necessary
libraries and writing the
skeleton of the program. An ambitious beginning, full of hopes and youthful energy. Perhaps not even a
heavy metal beginning, but still
emerging from the
fairy kingdom of
punk rock.
Offspring's
Beheaded will do nicely, or maybe
Hammerfall's energetic
Eternal Dark
The program now begins to fill up, the basic
classes appear out of
The Silent Void that is the
Tao of Programming. The pace is calm, accurate and precise, the motions are methodically pedantic, not unlike the quiet but intense
Nothing Else Matters, uncharacteristic of the usual
thrash metal style of
Metallica. The
representation invariants are being carved in stone as instance variables of representing classes.
Now, we move on to basic textual
i/o, the
workhorse of all programming and irreplaceable for
debugging purposes even in the most graphic
eye candy game. The well-oiled workings of
console input are like gears in a
Swiss clock, or the well-played duet of two radically different voices and the catchy melody of Metallica's
Enter Sandman
As much as the
relational databases are hated by any
sane programmer (in itself an
oxymoron), they are a part of our daily lives. The
database engine kicks in like the powerful motor of a
bulldozer, gripping the
system resources in a
steel-clad hand of the powerful
teutonic sound of undeservedly forgotten band
Grave Digger. The bulldozer plows through the database, pulling up
BLOBs and dates, salaries and
Social Insurance Numbers in its wake, akin to the
insanely heavy
Sad But True, or breaking its way trough walls like
Black Sabbath's
Ironman.
You make a break, calling it a day for programming. But the call of the compiler would not leave you, and high on caffeine, you mosey back to the monitor which has enslaved you, and is
pulling your strings like cocaine pulls the strings of an unfortunate addict, the cruel and heartless
Master of Puppets.
You are pulled in, and you begin your work on the demanding graphics routines. They are enormously complicated, staggering, they make you curse yourself for sleeping through the calculus lectures in college, they are as mind-boggling as the lyrics of
Iron Maiden's stunningly beautiful, beautiful as dynamic colored lighting,
Dream of Mirrors
After the program is finished comes debugging, sometimes as hectic as
The Mercenary by
Iron Maiden, sometimes as despairing as Metallica's
The Unforgiven.
Then you look at the clock, say "
holy shit", and forswear caffeine.