Time for another guest post, this time from Gary Jones. I met Gary through my hobby of BookCrossing and have done some copyediting work for him to complement his web development skills. I really like this beautiful meditation on a very different kind of language from that usually discussed on here.

Here’s what Gary sent me when I asked for a biography – I can’t put it better myself, so I won’t!

Gary Jones is a freelance web developer from Basingstoke with a keen interest in anything to do with the web. He specialises in WordPress sites using the Genesis theme framework. You can follow Gary on Twitter.

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I write code for a living. It could be in one of many languages, but all require careful checking as one misplaced or missing character could cause a fatal error and kill a website completely. Debugging code can be fun, or it can take hours to find where one single comma or semi colon is missing. There are many types of error within code, but pretty much all of them can come down to one thing – human error.

Code can have a beauty of its own. Whereas an author might weave a lavish scene with in-depth explanations of intricate details, the most impressive code is often the smallest fragment that does most of the work; one line of code that culminates from the conditional logic, foreach and while loops, switch statements and concatenations that kick-starts the application into life.

Encapsulations, polymorphism and synchronicity await those who dare to delve a little deeper. Code patterns, gradual degradation, progressive enhancements, refactorisations, even the terms related to code are elegant, and that’s just what good code should be – elegant, accurate and concise.