In my spare time, I'm very much a dabbler; I'd rather do lots of different small things than one large one. Also, I definitely have the mindset of your schoolfellow - I like to get input & output from early on, even if it bears little resemblance to the final product and I work very much by progressive revision/elaboration, solving each problem/bug as I encounter it rather than by planning stuff out in advance. This means that my first versions of most things are pretty buggy, and I wouldn't trust the reliability of anything large I'd written on my own. This is partly laziness, of course, I probably could be more disciplined and rigorous if I really made the effort, but it's not my natural inclination.
I definitely have the mindset of your schoolfellow - I like to get input & output from early on, even if it bears little resemblance to the final product and I work very much by progressive revision/elaboration
I think it's Simon who's the odd one out on this point. It's been accepted wisdom for decades that incremental development generally works much better than 'big bang' style programming. Brooks has a quote in The Mythical Man-Month somewhere about people being able to 'grow' much bigger programs than they could 'build'.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
In my spare time, I'm very much a dabbler; I'd rather do lots of different small things than one large one. Also, I definitely have the mindset of your schoolfellow - I like to get input & output from early on, even if it bears little resemblance to the final product and I work very much by progressive revision/elaboration, solving each problem/bug as I encounter it rather than by planning stuff out in advance. This means that my first versions of most things are pretty buggy, and I wouldn't trust the reliability of anything large I'd written on my own. This is partly laziness, of course, I probably could be more disciplined and rigorous if I really made the effort, but it's not my natural inclination.
I think it's Simon who's the odd one out on this point. It's been accepted wisdom for decades that incremental development generally works much better than 'big bang' style programming. Brooks has a quote in The Mythical Man-Month somewhere about people being able to 'grow' much bigger programs than they could 'build'.