I'm a lousy chess player, so I'll stick to your comment about "small quanta". What you suggest is one of the features of Agile Programming and the art of refac

I'm a lousy chess player, so I'll stick to your comment about "small quanta". What you suggest is one of the features of Agile Programming and the art of refactoring. Taking your music theme further, many applications are like a symphony or even an opera; large, complex, lots of performers, large complext score, need for a conductor, etc. Your chess inspired idea of programming is more like a jazz group - being clued in, playing off one another's riffs, improvising, etc without a score or conductor. Speaking of which, you might want to check out Live Coding (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_coding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_coding).