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My father, a Naval officer, was quite fond of shouting "Do something, even if it's stupid!" I expect that, in the heat of battle, indecision is worse than nothing at all.
Back in the day I worked for Dave Johnson's Working Software. We scored a big contract to port Random House Webster's Electronic Dictionary And Thesaurus College Edition - yes that was its real name - from MS-DOS to Mac OS System 7. Included in our contract was $5,000 "Timely Completion Bonus" of which I would receive $3k but only if I completed the work in the allotted time.
I found myself strangely unable to get started. Dave from time to time would politely ask me whether I had, then finally he got very assertive that I should start.
"Look: if you write anything at all, even if it crashes then you can debug it."
I remembered this recently, and it is working well for me. One must not implement too much buggy code or you will never get it debugged, but writing something bad then fixing it may well be better than not implementing anything at all.
(I got my bonus.)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by acharax on Wednesday April 22 2015, @04:28AM
...One must not implement too much buggy code or you will never get it debugged...
This is very true, the problem isn't in writing buggy code alone, it's in writing more code that depends on the buggy behavior found a layer underneath. If that buggy code is discovered at a later date and fixed anything reliant on its behavior becomes potentially buggy in its own right, fix that and now everything that depended on the 2nd layer's behavior becomes potentially buggy as well, depending how far down the call stack the original bug was the resulting amount of tests necessary to ensure proper functionality can quickly scale to unmanageable heights.
Thankfully many developers have learned to avoid this pitfall over the years by never testing their code at all (keeping the software in perpetual beta can help mask the nasty side effects of this development ethos too, what's not to like?).