[userbinator]

There's a difference between "thinking ahead into the next problem", i.e. premature generalisation, and "thinking ahead into the details of the current problem".

It's good that you mentioned Java, because it is a language which I find extremely IDE-centric, and I suspect that's also what causes easy premature generalisation --- creating new classes with tons of boilerplate automatically generated by the IDE is so easy that it encourages programmers to. That doesn't help one bit with the details of the algorithm, unfortunately; it often gets "OOP-ified" into a dozen classes and much-too-short methods created as a result of the "fiddle with it until it works" mentality.

[pitay]

'Fiddle with it until it works' has to be done when you are working with a product that isn't documented well enough. If that mentality is used in general for programming it is bad, but there are some situations where experimentation has to be done to work out how parts the product work.