> I've met a few programmers in my career who were able to write a huge amount of code doing wonderful things without testing at all. One guy I think of would s

> I've met a few programmers in my career who were able to write a huge amount of code doing wonderful things without testing at all. One guy I think of would spend days coding without even trying to compile his code and apparently, except for minor typos he could quickly fix, his code was working when he decided to compile and test it. A variation of this can be interesting to do as an exercise (in my case, a single-program exercise in school). Keep your problem simple, maybe data parsing or the like. Being in a really bad mood when you start can help. Cowboy code. Compile. Test. At any failure, delete everything and start fresh. By the time you code a first-time-working copy you'll probably have dropped a huge amount of unnecessary junk from your code, possibly changed approaches multiple times, and maybe found some patterns in your coding that you'd like to do away with. Nuking those code files can be surprisingly cathartic as well. Not sure how this would really go in a modern IDE or code editor though....