Neuroses and Programming

Are any of you guys neurotic? (Are all of you neurotic?)

I'm super neurotic. And I fear that, more than it helping me to program well, it gets in my way. I am obsessed with doing things the right way, and I begin to feel very uncomfortable if something I'm working on is becoming too complicated in the wrong way -- but somehow I'll be completely oblivious to how overblown my "clean and modular" solution ends up. But sometimes, the solution isn't obvious to me -- so if something is really stumping me, it eats my productivity and prevents me from feeling good about my work.

How do you deal with this? What general rules do you follow, and what do you do to put your mind at ease? For one thing, I'm thinking of getting a fish to put on my desk so that I can unload my stress on him.

>>1,17
Yeah, I get this also. I've been working on a side-project and I have spent *a lot* of time refactoring it over and over just trying to get a style and architecture that makes sense to me. I don't have enough experience with this stuff to understand how to do it properly.

The best solution I've found to keeping it under control is YAGNI (you ain't gonna need it). Basically exactly like >>19 says: do it in the most straightforward way possible, even if it leads to some dirty code or a small amount of duplication. Only refactor it if it starts being a big problem.

The only thing I don't agree with >>19 is that it's not a matter of optimization. I'm not trying to make it fast; I'm trying to make it clean, where clean is ill-defined. I only know that it's dirty when I look at it. That's the root of the neurosis.