Personally, I think Discipline is one of the things that separate “coders” from “engineers.”

This sounds like it’s really a treatise on “learning to build a house by making your own nails.”

Of course that won’t scale. Especially if most houses, these days, are prefab, and don’t use too many nails.

But learning how to stay out of flood plains, and selecting good prefab sources, is vital to being a builder. The first one is a fundamental discipline, that also applied to “make your own nails” building, while the second is unique to the new way we do things.

I like to write code that has a future. I want people to be able to take it over, so I use header documentation, and a consistent coding style.

I originally learned Machine Code (I started as an EE). I’ve written embedded operating systems and drivers.

A lot of what I learned, doesn’t apply to writing high-level application code in Swift (what I do nowadays), but it did give me the discipline to power through the “boring” stuff that is vital to writing good, maintainable, extensible code.

I think maybe there is a confusion between “discipline” (the type that manifests as patience, consistency, and craftsmanship), and “experienced inflexibility,” which is not always applicable (and sometimes, downright destructive, like old-fashioned C++ programmers refusing to use smart pointers).