Write code like you just learned how to program

The author here is talking about the importance of plowing ahead with a vision, but the title initially made me think of something else. Now that I've been programming for over a decade professionally, I've accumulated a lot of practical experience. On balance this makes me a better programmer, but it also makes me worry more about everything: maintenance, bugs, version upgrades, etc. Wrestling with all possible issues can be paralyzing. Often it's better to just get something done, even…

I think this misses why we structure code in the first place. It's not because it's aesthetically pleasant or anyone cares about or cool usage of the visitor pattern, but because unstructured newbie code only takes you so far in the most literal sense. There's a point, a number of lines of code, where unstructured code becomes completely unmaintainable. You can't add to it, you can't change it, you certainly can't understand it. It's just what it is. Structure, modeling…

You might be interested in the extensive discussion about this from when it was posted 2 months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2037576

I mostly agree, albeit with some caveats. I've seen absolutely awful copypasta spaghetti code with a cargo-cult attitude to everything it did which compiled into a highly rated app, and also carefully engineered code which spent years in development yet only got to go live for a few weeks before the investors got cold feet. On the other hand, I've also seen bad code that made the app it compiled into unreliable and hard to fix; and well-made code which…