Theta Code

In a book called Scientology 8-8008, L. Ron Hubbard defines a “universe” like this:

A universe is defined as “a whole system of created things.” There could be and are many universes and there could be many kinds of universes.

If you’ve never thought about it, it might be hard to envision the idea of a universe that doesn’t look or act like this one. Here’s a way to think about it: Yesterday, I ran into an abstract artist and I had this thought about her art–I asked her, “If you could create a universe, would it look like this one [the physical universe]?” Instantly, she said, “No!” This is something that I had not understood about abstract art until that very point–that it represents a whole universe made by the artist, not a representation of this universe. Her universe has colors and swirls and represents things in a whole different way than this universe.

So that’s a very wild example of “a universe”–the things that you see in abstract paintings. That’s “a whole system of created things” completely different from the universe we’re used to seeing (the physical universe).

In a much less wild way, a computer program is also a whole universe. For example, let’s take a simple program that adds 1 plus 1 and gets 2. (Read More…)

We’ve long known that a programmer’s productivity depends largely upon how much he enjoys his work environment and the task that he’s been assigned. We know that various things that make the environment nicer assist productivity, for some seemingly ungraspable reason.

To me, at least, this has long been a mystery. Why is it that a programmer, given total understanding of his field, excellent training, and high intelligence, could yet produce better in a more enjoyable environment? It would seem to have nothing to do with the interaction between a person and a machine, as programming seems to be.

Well, in Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, L. Ron Hubbard talks about pleasure, over and over. One of the things he says is:

There is a necessity for pleasure, a necessity as live and quivering and vital as the human heart itself. … The creative, the constructive, the beautiful, the harmonious, the adventurous, yes, and even escape from the maw of oblivion, these things are pleasure and these things are necessity.

Talk to anybody who worked at Netscape in its early days, and they will tell you that there was a sense of adventure in what they were doing. Talk to some of the people who work on Google’s greatest projects, and ask them about how pleasurable they find their jobs. Ask the Apple engineers how enjoyable it was to create the iPhone, or to design Mac OS X. Ask the world’s greatest user interface designers if the harmony of a perfectly usable, good-looking interface isn’t something that makes them happy.

Or just ask me why I have spent the last four years of my life working on Bugzilla.

The world’s greatest creations don’t come from the desire to make a quick buck, or the fear of a manager’s wrath. They don’t come merely from some programmer’s desire to prove how smart they are, and impress their peers. And they definitely don’t come about from organizations where programmers sit, blank-faced and void of thought, forced to stare at a computer to the exclusion of all else for eight hours a day, deprived of the pleasures of life. No, true creation flourishes in environments that bring into being that necessity “as live and quivering and vital as the human heart itself”–pleasure.

-Max

In Scientology 0-8: The Book Of Basics, L. Ron Hubbard says:

Goodness and Badness, Beautifulness and Ugliness, are alike considerations and have no other basis than opinion.

I’ve heard many programmers talk about “beautiful code.” Of course, it seems to mean something different to everybody! People can definitely have arguments over what is good or beautiful in code.

Now, most people don’t write code and then think, “Aw, that code was terrible, horrible, and ugly.” Most programmers are pretty happy when they complete a project, and tend to admire their own creations. They might have a terrible tangled mass of code, but to them it might be beautiful. For us, though, who have to fix their terrible, tangled mass of code, maybe it’s not so beautiful.

So what can we do about people this like? Obviously, we know that there are better ways to write code and worse ways, and we’ve formed our opinions based on experience or having read some sensible things and agreed with them. We can’t just let people write terrible code and mess things up. So what do we do?

Well, has anybody ever changed your opinion about something? How did they do it? If you read something and thought it was sensible, and came to see why “good” code was “good”, and “bad” code was “bad”, then perhaps that person could read that thing too! Perhaps you could explain to them gently why you hold your opinions, and give them the chance to change theirs. Perhaps you could show them some good evidence, and they’d change their mind.

At the very least, a little communication probably wouldn’t hurt anybody.

No matter what you choose, once you realize that all that’s happening is you have different opinions, the way is open to do something about it.

By the way, the quote above is part of the “Axioms of Scientology.” In Scientology, “axioms” are:

axioms: Statements of natural laws on the order of those of the physical sciences.

That’s from the glossary of a book called Advanced Procedure and Axioms, by L. Ron Hubbard.

The axioms are numbered, and the axiom above is Axiom 31. The rest of them are all very interesting, and I’d recommend you get a copy of Scientology 0-8: The Book Of Basics, if you want to read the rest of them.

-Max