I've had the same experience when writing, whereby my bad stuff was intertwined with my good stuff to the point where merely editing it was not worthwhile, and

I've had the same experience when writing, whereby my bad stuff was intertwined with my good stuff to the point where merely editing it was not worthwhile, and found that I need (at least) one draft to organize my thoughts before writing a final draft from scratch that generally needs very little editing. The conclusion I came to was that I just need to always write that second draft, rather than Stephenson's conclusion that he just needs to write the better draft the first time. To each his own, I guess . . . But comparing writing a novel to programming a complex system seems pretty naive, to say the least. The first obvious difference is that a novel (generally) comes out of one person's head, but most larger projects end up far too large for any one person to truly keep it all in their head and understand all the interactions. That immediately makes it pretty much impossible to just do things right the first time; there are always things you don't understand or forget about when working on a larger project. There's also the fact that vagueness is tolerated and often desired in a novel, whereas it's not an option when programming; that just means there are more details to "get right", more decisions to make, and more interactions to worry about. In addition, a program generally has a definite purpose, and you can't re-define your goal as easily based on what it actually does (though sometimes you can; when writing, you often have an idea of where you're going or what effect you want, but if you end up with something different it might still be fine. There are a ton of other differences as well, of course; those are just the ones that first come to mind.