[andy_wrote]

I agree totally re your point of not understanding of the domain, it can be really hard to make good conceptual models until you've actually tried throwing some code at the walls.

I guess I'd rephrase your point about "one to treat as a throwaway" as saying that you should realistically expect to be moving back and forth between architecting the conceptual model and implementing it. I find it useful to first think about the conceptual model, then write some code for a while, then revisit the model and see what difficulties I've hit and/or what new good ideas I've thought of in the process, etc.

[nicoslepicos]

Definitely what you're saying. Thanks for adding even more deeper context. Accepting that back and forth: code, learn, code process.

And to your point too about first thinking about the conceptual model, agree that you should spend at least a bit of time before doing anything else. Thinking through your modeling is something that doesn't take that much time and has such huge payoffs in terms of avoiding pitfalls. But often times it's just funner to start writing code so people do that.

It's always saddening to see programmers just dive in and start coding without planning / thinking about the problem first.