Comment by bjterry

This article reminds me of one of my all-time favorite articles. Quantity Always Trumps Quality by Jeff Atwood [1]. There is a bunch of commentary on it on Less Wrong [2], some of which is interesting. Also an interesting parallel to a Paul Graham post [3]:

> I was taught in college that one ought to figure out a program completely on paper before even going near a computer. I found that I did not program this way. I found that I liked to program sitting in front of a computer, not a piece of paper. Worse still, instead of patiently writing out a complete program and assuring myself it was correct, I tended to just spew out code that was hopelessly broken, and gradually beat it into shape. Debugging, I was taught, was a kind of final pass where you caught typos and oversights. The way I worked, it seemed like programming consisted of debugging.

> For a long time I felt bad about this, just as I once felt bad that I didn't hold my pencil the way they taught me to in elementary school. If I had only looked over at the other makers, the painters or the architects, I would have realized that there was a name for what I was doing: sketching. As far as I can tell, the way they taught me to program in college was all wrong. You should figure out programs as you're writing them, just as writers and painters and architects do.

1: http://blog.codinghorror.com/quantity-always-trumps-quality/

2: http://lesswrong.com/lw/53e/just_try_it_quantity_trumps_qual...

3: http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html