In the last couple of days, I've been reading the auto-biography of the american playwright Neil Simon titled "Rewrite". Besides being very funny, he wrote about the practice of rewriting, e.g., he rewrote 22 times his first play. Of course, there are many such stories for each and every one of the great writers, actually even those not so great. I liked the fact that a writer can refuse to show people his/her work until he/she is satisfied, and typically after many re-writes. Sometimes I wish that I could have that luxury when writing code, I assume the lack of such contributes to the so much
embarassing code I wrote, and continue to produce. Some people would say that the final judgement of a play is the live audiance, and that of a program its users. But in literature, people seem to understand better that the path to good work goes through the land of rewrites, while in programming "how long will that take" is often the question asked about rewrites.