[chubot]

Yeah I kinda think people are always "learning from their last mistake" (and that's definitely true for me)

- Sometimes you hack, and you end up with a mess. And then the lesson you learn is to study the prior art first.

- Sometimes you spin your wheels reading stuff that isn't actually applicable to the problem you have. Then the lesson learned is to "do the simplest thing that could work", "solve 80% of the problem with 20% of the effort", etc.

So to me, programming is really a cycle of learning, and you can't really generalize the order of doing things ... It's iterative stumbling and learning, in both orders :)