“Hello world” is always beautiful

Every programming language you've ever learned began with "Hello world".

"Hello World" is typically a couple lines long, and it's always simple and easy to understand. You probably moved on to something like a to-do list after that -- also enticingly simple and easy.

Now, stop for a moment and consider the last bit of production code you touched. Not so beautiful, right?

There are a couple takeaways from this juxtaposition. First, any language / framework looks great in that introductory scope. Not only is a simple use case a godsend to show how elegant a tool is, any tool will pick a domain / scenario that suits their tool when they create that demo app.

The second takeaway is a little more reflective. Remember the joy of learning that new language, the freedom you felt looking at the untarnished simple code, and the optimism you felt when you started to extend it. Now, flip back to that production code again. What can you do to get some of that simplicity and usability back to your production code? Certainly, it'll never look like "hello, world", but I think it's worth a moment's reflection every now and again to see if you can get just a little closer.

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