[troels]

"Thinking first, writing later. When practicing for the ACM programming competitions in college, I discovered that when writing code before understanding the solution, I eventually needed to start over. I have never seen a counterexample."

The thing is. Some times writing code is how you best come to understand the solution. One of the things that have made me a better programmer, was exactly realising this. If there is something I don't understand, I now try to program it, rather than thinking too much over it first. Call it prototyping if you want. It's a fine line of course.

[chrisaycock]

I like what Fred Brooks says here, something along the lines of: Be prepared the throw the first one away since you will anyhow.