Few weeks back, Paul Graham published a post on having kids. When I was finished with the post, I knew I had read something very insightful. The topic of his essay was mundane, done probably a million times, but his perspective never is. I don’t know where the magic comes from, but he has a special ability to distill the wisdom lying in the far corners of the brain—what you might not know you know.

I was sixteen when I first read The Pragmatic Programmer. Back then, my programming career was in its very early stages—crude websites, silly games, and even sillier quizzes. The code I wrote was a shoddy, incomprehensible mess (for a long while, I preferred creating a single massive file, instead of modularizing the code in some way). I had only begun to learn that the job of a software developer goes beyond just making it work, that you’re writing code not for machines but humans, and a quote from The Pragmatic Programmer had a catalytic effect on me in that regard:

India has dozens of languages and countless dialects, and English serves as a necessary tool to bridge the linguistic gap. No matter where you go, you can expect at least someone around who can understand and speak it reasonably well.

What if messy code could be fun, not frustrating?

In 2004, Paul Graham wrote an essay on the perks of picking a less-popular language.