Coding Trance

In an essay at Slate, David Auerbach tells a story about John Harris, a game-programmer: “While working on an 8-bit Atari port of Frogger in the early 1980s, Harris said, “’ glued my hands to the keyboard.’ One day he started programming midafternoon, losing himself in work. The next time he looked up from the screen, he was surprised that it was still light out, since he thought he’d been working well into the evening. It was actually the next morning.”

Auerbach thinks that coding trances are different from other sorts of self-forgetful “flow”: “There’s a lot of talk about these kind of trancelike ‘flow’ states of total absorption. I’m not convinced that they’re all the same, and for me, the coder’s high is qualitatively different from anything else I’ve experienced. Books, movies, games, and even writing will sometimes absorb me to that degree, but it’s a very different feeling. It’s not as real, it’s not as addictive, and it’s not as perfect. Or rather, it doesn’t have that promise of perfection (especially not writing), since the trance deceptively transports you to a perfect, orderly world of algorithms and code that the end result never quite matches – as consumers know too well.”

A main difference, he claims, is that coders who enter trance-like states usually produce useful code: “I’ve never heard an artist describe a trance that measured up. Maybe they just don’t have the words for it, but creative trances seem far more like drug-induced stupors, in which things may seem clear at the time but are usually hazy fever dreams – for every ‘Kubla Khan,’ there are a thousand awful poems and paintings born of these fever dreams that lack significance to anyone but their creator. Code may be buggy, it may need serious overhaul later, but it compiles, it works (more or less), and it’s the same outside the trance as inside the trance. After a minor writing trance, I’ll usually say, ‘This is going to need some serious editing.’ After a coding trance, I’d say, ‘This is good stuff! That was seriously productive!’”