for each desired change, make the change easy (warning: this may be hard), then make the easy change

—Kent Beck https://twitter.com/kentbeck/status/250733358307500032?lang=en

I’ve been working on Wizard’s Castle lately, fixing some bugs and making some incremental improvements.

Quick background: I “translated” this a few years ago, from the original Basic to teach myself some things about Common Lisp and about control and data-flow for simple games, about going from GOTOs to structures and function calls1.

But I keep tinkering with it because … I made some mistakes. I didn’t understand how to use some of the language features, reinvented some wheels, and generally “over-engineered”. The temptation to re-write is strong, as it’s a small program and I’ve learned a lot of things since.

But it works.

I should say, I have, in fact rewritten a lot of it, in another file, but that’s not a working game. It’s better code in most respects, except the most crucial one. The challenge I see for myself now, is, how do I go about making it better while conserving it’s status as a working game?

So I’ve resumed fiddling with it to exercise how to plan progressive improvements, execute refactoring strategies, and the discipline of not breaking the game.

… but let’s get real. Although I like to imagine this as a self-improvement effort for developing relevant professional skills, I have to admit, the way I gravitate to this project is almost certainly therapeutically motivated.

Consider: A small, low-stakes project, of obscure provenance, with a personal, nostalgic connection—it’s not the kind of thing that one works on when looking forward in life, at least not if they like what they see ahead.

You’ve read the news. We’d all rather wander magic castles full of monsters than do the real world work of making incremental improvements in the systems we use to distribute justice and mercy in society. Now doesn’t seem like the time to be working on little games.

Still, it’s the one area of my life right now where doing a little thing, for the sake of a little thing, will seem like Enough.

1 Also because, hilariously, CL is roughly contemporaneous, although perhaps I should have used Scheme.