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Comment by cerved | Hacker News Reader

quantity !== quality

There is a (perhaps apocryphal) story about the art class which was separated into 2 groups - one group worked on a single project all semester and the other group worked on a new project every day. People in the group that worked on a project every day produced better work than people in the "single project" group. My google-fu is weak, so I cannot find the reference.

I'm not suggesting that the Javascript ecosystem is filled with awesome stuff, but sometimes quantity leads to quality.

This is the running premise behind the book Art and Fear, which basically concludes that iteration with quality feedback is the best way to develop your abilities and produce your best work. That is, quantity is the best path to quality.

https://www.amazon.com/Art-Fear-Observations-Rewards-Artmaki...

Hmm. The "fear" aspect sounds a lot like what Steve Yegge called software conservatism.

Thank you!

Maybe because art art school you always do the same thing: so doing it continually for one semester or restarting projects on shorter times, the final thing would be quite the same, except that if you work on more small projects, you will maybe learn faster.

And, your art is yours. No artist is able to do huge harm to a whole industry by releasing some crappy painting with terrible design choices. They're only harming themselves and/or their reputation.

There is a parallel though: bad art is weeded out over time, the good stuff remains. In software it is quite similar, the good stuff has staying power, the bad stuff will be forgotten soon enough. The average half-life of a typical javascript framework is quite telling in this respect.

TypeError exception: Expected even more equals signs.

Shut up, we all know that's a silent error!

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