@emperorcezar: Good point! I'd say it applies to me, yes. There's many subtle reminders to not just hack crap out. 🙂 (My perspective is that I'm an investigator writing a notebook, and delivering the software artifact is almost incidental. That way, rather than get depressed I had to throw away 3 approaches, these are perfectly fine twists & turns to write up.)

i like that. another way of expressing this, @tjg, is the difference between the goal and the strategy. the Goal is some tool that allows users to do X. that's immovable. the Strategy, is your code to produce that tool. you can change that until you arrive at one that works. very often, i see junior (and sometimes more senior) devs get stuck because they've conflated the two; they've convinced themselves the Strategy is immovable, rather than the Goal.

this comes straight out of Marshall Rosenberg's Non-Violent Communication, which i highly recommend as 'personality seasoning' for any developer 🙂

Ah thanks, I've heard a bit of Non-Violent Communication, but will check out the book now.

I have an anxiety disorder and I find that being in the mode where I hack things out the door just exacerbates it.

So it's good to have a culture that promotes hammock time to do something right.

i’m working on a clojure project at work right now, but our culture doesn’t promote hammock time.

i think most of my mental health is affected by things other than programming language of choice tho.

the best thing i've found for overall mental health strategy is the message within Mindset by Carol Dweck

once you buy in and adopt the 'growth mindset' stance, and root out its opposite - the 'fixed mindset', within you, you can tackle anything

I think of "learned helplessness" with languages that make you wait years to get a new for loop. Instead of letting you code one yourself. (Without resorting to a precompiler.) I didn't feel like an adult programmer until I started using a Lisp.