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Comment by lacampbell | Hacker News Reader

Is that really a long-term productivity boost? I wager the cost of maintaining and debugging the vomited code destroys any total productivity advantage.

Of course I am completely biased in that I can bold barely anything of a program in my head. I feel like that makes me a better programmer in terms of writing shorter, maintainable code. It's hard to assess yourself honestly though.

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"vomit" maybe isn't the best word.

The point is they are able to in their head: compose the program, notice bugs, fix those bugs, possibly tweaking the design in the process.

Basically, they can prefect the design in their head and fix a lot of bugs all before starting type.

It's true the resulting code isn't perfect. But there are design advantages to holding the code in your head that make up for sloppiness at least that was my observation. A code review for error checking is certainly advisable and good practice to boot!

but the thing is the poor person finding bugs or adding features in the code is going to spend 2x as long. and then 2x as long the next time, and the next time... "no we can't re-write it, it's working code! just add the feature...".

If Mr. 4x had slowed down a bit and written something more structured, the overall cost would have been less, surely.

No nothing like that at least the couple I've worked with. I think you are confusing these people with "coding minds" with people that can churn out working code quickly (they are a different beast). The code produced by the 4x people is very elegant structurally because they can see how it fits together, this is the strength but it may be missing some edge cases / functionality and or validation in the first pass.

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