The Rules of Programming

Rule 15. Pull the Weeds

When my daughters were young, we had a Nintendo GameCube. It turns out that one side effect of having a dad who makes video games for a living is that your house is fully equipped with every single video game console. My children did not realize until much later that not everyone’s house was like this.

Our favorite game was Animal Crossing, a game in which the three of us shared a small village filled with anthropomorphized animals. You could do all kinds of things in the village—dig for fossils, design new clothes, decorate your house, gather seashells, go fishing, make friends with the animals who lived in the town, or just kick back and listen to KK Slider play his guitar.

One of the things you sort of needed to do in Animal Crossing was pull weeds. Every night, a few weeds would pop up in your village, whether you’d played the game that day or not. Pulling weeds was easy—run over to the weed, push a button, and pop! The weed’s out of the ground. But you needed to keep up. The weeds kept growing whether you pulled them or not. The weeds even grew on days you didn’t play the game! If you stopped pulling weeds, the weeds took over.

They’re still making Animal Crossing games 20 years later. Tens of millions of people have played some iteration of the game, and every single one has had the same experience—you come back to the tidy little village you’ve worked so hard on after a few weeks away, and it’s completely overgrown with weeds. Twenty years later, ...