“I write to discover what I think.”
— Daniel J. Boorstin
There is @David_Tschumperle’s How to write clean G’MIC code ? thread. I went on at length on the topic of code clarity in Post #61: Voynich Manuscript, and will spare you all an encore.
I’ve no quibble with this. G’MIC doodling is a kind of image-processing solitaire with the personal, private aim of seeing what might crop up, and sometimes something good does. I’ve misplaced the link, but I remember a post that @David_Tschumperle made in his personal blog about one of the motivations of designing G’MIC in a particular way: to have a playpen where one can concentrate on the game at hand, with a minimum distraction from the language’s execution requirements: no code-compile iterations, for example. G’MIC has been designed for play.
For me, these private playpen activities spawn tutorials, but whilst there, I do not worry too much about wielding the appurtenances of clarity — careful variable naming, commenting, clean coding; it is not time for that. But I do have clarity in mind, because, for me, G’MIC doodling is very much an exercise in the Boorstin sense: I am trying to clarify what I am thinking. Out of that clarification a tutorial may spring forth, and should that happen, then the game changes: I have come into possession of some discovery that I wish to share. From there on, along that line of an express intent to communicate, the rules of clarity come into play.