Stop inventing new ways of doing things

Every so often I write this same thing. It’s Monday (any Monday) and so it’s time to write it again.

The solution to very few problems is to write more code. Usually, it is better to write things in English, explaining whatever the thing is.

This is mainly because it takes a good long while to write code, and continues to take time for as long as the codebase exists. This time is better spent actually doing something — code is pretty much always ‘meta’ work, or work that supports other work.

And don’t go saying that all work is like that, because it’s just not. (Hurrumph.) Working on preserving, describing, and storing all the books of the realm is work that has value in itself; writing the software for doing that is meta-work. I’d rather work on the former.