[ISeemToBeAVerb]

As a beginner at programming, I find _Why to be a breath of fresh air. I realize that experienced coders may berate him for advocating writing sloppy code, but for someone (like me) who is just getting into this deep rabbit hole, I find his thoughts to be encouraging. I fully agree with some of the comments here that mention writing bad code is the only path to writing clean and safe code. I wish more experienced hackers could recall a day that, they too, wrote bad code. As a beginner, I'm positive that much of my code would make people here cringe, but hey, at least I'm learning! Ultimately, I think that was Why's point. Kids and beginners shouldn't worry if their code is "correct", they should just write code and keep learning. I think that's a noble endeavor and a great legacy.

[oinksoft]

There's a balance though. In your free time, you should be the mad scientist, but on the job, correctness and maintainability is crucial in your final product. You can even play the mad scientist at work, but production-quality code has to be clean and professional, and that should be your code's final form.

[joeyespo]

Yes, this is so true. Too often someone wants to learn a new technique and throws it in production code without fully understanding it. Others get stuck maintaining it, also without fully understanding the technique, and because a full refactor is usually too expensive to justify.

It's great for learning on your own time, but hurts so many others when doing it professionally.

[jarin]

A day that I wrote bad code? I write bad code EVERY day!

Then I fix it and it's great.