The common pattern he mentions reminds me of the concept of 'semantic compression' (one big function and lots of variables first, then break it up into structs,

The common pattern he mentions reminds me of the concept of 'semantic compression' (one big function and lots of variables first, then break it up into structs, classes, functions, etc.) by Casey Muratori: https://mollyrocket.com/casey/stream_0019.html https://mollyrocket.com/casey/stream_0019.html It's a very nice and natural way to write code to do it all horribly dirty and only when a sizeable portion if ready to start cleaning it up and making it look and read good. Both are basically "good comes from evolving/refining bad".