2 ms·

I'd love to see some advances in IDEs, but the author is saying pretty clearly that the bulk of the time taken was in high-level decision making, not in struggl

• tonyedgecombe 10y ago
  Yes, good tooling can shave minutes or hours off here and there, maybe pick out a few bugs but it won't save you from spending months or years writing an ill-conceived product.
• Edmond 10y ago
  That statement in a way makes my point. Good tooling should help the creator offload a lot of the "thinking about your program", rather it should help you focus on what you want to do. Also the long time taken in high-level decision making is strongly tied to the difficulty of getting even a trivial piece of software working, even if it isn't always apparent. For instance if the output of the high-level decision making was to create a spreadsheet or PowerPoint presentation, I am sure it wouldn't take anywhere as long. I have a few long rants on this topic that I'll be putting on the Crudzilla blog (blog.crudzilla.com), stay tuned :)
• evincarofautumn 10y ago
  Yup. I’ve been working on a project off and on for a few years now, where if I had known exactly what I was building in the first place, then it would have taken me just a few weeks. But writing it (and rewriting it) was the only way to actually arrive at that knowledge.