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{"id":16222,"date":"2014-06-23T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-06-23T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=1151"},"modified":"2014-06-23T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2014-06-23T00:00:00","slug":"coding-trance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2014\/06\/coding-trance\/","title":{"rendered":"Coding Trance"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n<\/head>

In an\u00a0essay<\/a> at Slate<\/em>, David Auerbach tells a story about John Harris, a game-programmer: \u201cWhile working on an 8-bit Atari port of Frogger<\/em> in the early 1980s, Harris said, \u201c\u2019 glued my hands to the keyboard.\u2019 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\u2019d been working well into the evening. It was actually the next morning.\u201d<\/p>\n

Auerbach thinks that coding trances are different from other sorts of self-forgetful \u201cflow\u201d: \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of talk about these kind of trancelike \u2018flow\u2019 states of total absorption. I\u2019m not convinced that they\u2019re all the same, and for me, the coder\u2019s high is qualitatively different from anything else I\u2019ve experienced. Books, movies, games, and even writing will sometimes absorb me to that degree, but it\u2019s a very different feeling. It\u2019s not as real, it\u2019s not as addictive, and it\u2019s not as perfect. Or rather, it doesn\u2019t 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 \u2013 as consumers know too well.\u201d<\/p>\n

A main difference, he claims, is that coders who enter trance-like states usually produce useful code:\u00a0\u201cI\u2019ve never heard an artist describe a trance that measured up. Maybe they just don\u2019t 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 \u2013 for every \u2018Kubla Khan,\u2019 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<\/em>, it works<\/em> (more or less), and it\u2019s the same outside the trance as inside the trance. After a minor writing trance, I\u2019ll usually say, \u2018This is going to need some serious editing.\u2019 After a coding trance, I\u2019d say, \u2018This is good stuff! That was seriously productive!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"