"So You Want To Be A Programmer?"

[Davidson Corry]

On Wed, 02 Jul 2008 06:57:17 -0700, Manfred_Nowak <svv1999 at hotmail.com>  
wrote:

>> Build one to throw away.
>
> That's not a contradiction.
> One is still free to define "coding the real thing" to be
> "programming".

Oh, aye. For that matter, Brooks' own feelings on the matter have outgrown  
the bare "throw away" project.

But in any project of significant size, you don't code the final version  
on the first try. (*I* never do, I'll tell you that!) There is a lot of  
evolution and re-design based on experiment and discovery. Heck, that is  
the heart of, for example, scrum. No experiment is a failure if you learn  
 from it; naetheless, there is often an element of it that you throw away.

Put it this way: if only the lines of code that actually ship are "the  
real thing", then I get paid a lot for not-programming.