

Write Code Like You Just Learned How to Program - abstractwater
http://prog21.dadgum.com/87.html

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RiderOfGiraffes
You might be interested in the extensive discussion about this from when it
was posted 2 months ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2037576>

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mrcharles
I like this post, because I realized a while ago that a switch in my brain
flipped, and now the act of programming in a language I don't know barely
slows me down. I pull up a language reference and just go to town.

There was a time when I wasn't confident enough to do that, and would avoid
new languages/frameworks/whatever, because I didn't 'know' them. I am so much
better now for having moved past that.

I think I agree more with the feel of the article than the actual statement.
If his point is to say that you should persist even if you aren't perfect at
something, then absolutely. If he's saying you should just write bad code and
not worry about it, obviously, I disagree.

But when you start, you _always_ write bad code. I learned python a few weeks
ago for a pipeline for an iphone game I'm making. I'm learning Objective C
right now. I know a lot of what I've written is probably crap -- but as I
write more, I realize what was crap and fix it when I bump in to it.

The learning mindset is more important than the "stubbornly move forward"
mindset. His skull demo example is a good story. If that person never learned
another thing, he would eventually be driven insane by trying to deal with the
complexity of a large scale project. If he learned ways to improve, moving
forward, he could continue building even bigger and better bleeding skulls.

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sktrdie
If you're only presenting something and don't care about code maintainability,
this approach will work. Otherwise it's just stupid... you would never want to
maintain some code that didn't go through a design process. It would be hell
even if you wrote it yourself.

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udp
This is a duplicate: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2037576>

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methodin
What this article is really stating is to spend most of your time on marketing
and business ideas rather than building the product yourself. Coding like you
don't care will not help matters unless you are painfully slow at coding with
care.

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paulnelligan
That's kind of how I approached nift.ie ... the code is convoluted (which is
probably why most task management systems don't handle subtasks), but hey, it
works!

