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by SamReidHughes 5869 days ago
When I left school my biggest gap was in my practical idea-to-code translation ability. I'm talking about the ability to sit down and write some useful code. I had spent the previous three years thinking about type systems, programming language design, and math, and when faced with the problem of having to make some code that would do some thing, I'd say, "What's the simplest angle from which to look at this problem?" It turns out that a much faster way for me to get well-designed working code was to just stop worrying and implement it badly, and not care about the design -- the best angle is from the inside. I've learned to artificially devalue good design.