The programmer Bryan Cantrill notes that coders vastly prefer to figure out the cleanest fix for a bug, some solution that will neatly deal with every possible situation the software might face. When they can’t do that—maybe they don’t have the time, or maybe the bug simply defeats them—they’ll reluctantly use an inelegant solution: a sprawling bunch of lines that deal with the four specific fail-conditions, the strange edge cases they’re aware of, and they’ll just cross their fingers and pray there aren’t more edge cases out there lurking. Technically, they’ll have solved their problem. But they’ll hate themselves so much that they’ll often add a comment next to their solution, castigating themselves—and calling their code “gross,” “disgusting,” or “vile.” For programmers, inefficient code is an offense to the soul.