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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

it's an odd analogy because programs are complex systems and involve interaction between countless of people. With large software projects you don't even know where you want to go or what's going to happen until you work. A large project doesn't fit into some pre-planned algorithm in anyone's head, it's a living thing.

diagrams and this kind of planning is mostly a waste of time to be honest. You just need to start to work, and rework if necessary. This article is basically the peak of the bell curve meme. It's not 90% thinking, it's 10% thinking and 90% "just type".

Novelists for example know this very well. Beginners are always obsessed with intellectually planning out their book. The experienced writer will always tell you, stop yapping and start typing.

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Your part of your comment doesn't fit with the rest. With complex projects, you often don't even know exactly what you're building, it doesn't make sense to start coding. You first need to build a conceptual model, discuss it with the interested parties and only then start building. Diagrams are very useful to solidify your design and communicate it to others.

There's a weird tension between planning and itterating. You can never forsee anywhere close to enough with just planning. But if you just start without a plan you can easily work yourself into a dead end. So you need enough planning to avoid the dead ends, whilst starting early enough so you get your reality checks so you have enough information to get to an actual solution.

Relevant factors here are how cheaply you can detect failure (in terms of time, material, political capital, team morale) and how easily you can backtrack out of a bad design decision (in terms of political capital, how much other things need to be redone due to coupling, and other limitations).

The earlier you can detect bad decisions, and the easier you can revert them, the less planning you need. But sometimes those are difficult.

It also suggests that continuous validation and forward looking to detect bad decisions early can be warranted. Something which I myself need to get better at.

> Novelists for example know this very well. Beginners are always obsessed with intellectually planning out their book. The experienced writer will always tell you, stop yapping and start typing.

This is not true in general. Brandon Sanderson for example outlines extensively before writing: https://faq.brandonsanderson.com/knowledge-base/can-you-go-i...

> You just need to start to work, and rework if necessary

And making changes on paper is cheaper than in code.

I'm tempted to break out the notebook again, but... beyond something that's already merged, what situations make paper changes cheaper than code changes? I can type way faster than I can write.

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