begin quoting Andrew Lentvorski as of Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 03:34:35PM -0700: > Lan Barnes wrote: > > >How long does it take to write a hit song? A symphony? A novel? Hint: > >actual numbers are all over the place and bear little relationship to the > >final quality. > > I take exception to the statement that they bear little relationship to > the final quality.
Looking at effort spent is not a good indicator of quality. Asimov did pretty damn good with apparently not much effort. Tolkien did amazing, but with an insane amount of effort. Quite a lot of drek has near-tolkienish amounts of effort put in to it. > Those who write "hits" tend to be *very* productive. They tend to > produce "very good" quite a lot and occasionally cross into the > "stellar" territory. I like the description of how Wodehouse wrote, and the idea that we can apply it to programming: http://basildoncoder.com/blog/2008/03/21/the-pg-wodehouse-method-of-refactoring/ -- I tend to consider programming a sort of literature for very stupid children. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
