Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jacobolus 2382 days ago
You are right. It is typically more effective to write one implementation as a hacky prototype, play with it a bit, throw it away, and then rewrite a production implementation from scratch, so that the mistakes of a design made by someone inexperienced don’t get baked in forever.

Unfortunately there are cultural/psychological factors which often preclude or discourage this method, even if it would save time and produce better code in the medium term than either exhaustive planning up front uninformed by practice OR just iterating the initial broken version to continually meet new requirements.

1 comments

Lol, ninjaed, see above.