Pioneering work is ugly

“A mathematician’s reputation rests on the number of bad proofs he has given. (Pioneer work is clumsy.)” — A. S. Besicovitch

I’m sure I’ve written about this quote somewhere, but I can’t find where. The quote comes from A Mathematician’s Miscellany by J. E. Littlewood, citing Besicovitch.

I’ve more often seen the quote concluding with “Pioneering work is ugly.” Maybe that’s what Besicovitch actually said, but I suspect it came from someone misremembering/improving Littlewood’s citation. Since the words are in parentheses, perhaps Besicovitch didn’t say them at all but Littlewood added them as commentary.

One way of interpreting the code is to say it takes more creativity to produce a rough draft than to edit it.

The quote came to mind when I was talking to a colleague about the value of ugly code, code that is either used once or that serves as a prototype for something more lasting.

This is nearly the opposite of the attitude I had as a software developer and as a software team manager. But it all depends on context. Software techniques need to scale down as well as scale up. It doesn’t make sense to apply the same formality to disposable code and to enterprise software.

Yes, supposedly disposable code can become permanent. And as soon as someone realizes that disposable code isn’t being disposed of it should be tidied up. But to write every little one-liner as if it is going to be preserved for posterity is absurd.

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