the new math: old battle of the lovees was: PDP1 3581

snip

I think I get your point -- didn't someone well-known say something like "the best is the enemy of the good"?

Still, my experience has been that people who "spit out the code and then debug it" are apt to produce code that starts out buggy and stays buggy, while the ones that think first and then code are more apt to produce code that works right after perhaps a bit of tidying up of incorrect syntax. So that makes you the better programmer, in my book.

The ones who write code that starts out buggy and stays that way often seem to be operating in a mode I think of as -- I'm not sure what to call it, something like "programming as evolution" -- the point being that they seem to be trying things at random until something appears to work, at least for the test cases they bother to try.

Then again, my experience is pretty much exclusively with applications programming, and maybe things are different in this respect as in others in o-s-level programming.

-- B. L. Mbuttingill ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.