Can a writer really refuse to show his/her work when under contractual deadlines? Is this really that different from the creative output of a software developer? Once the work has been released into the world, literary authors don't go back to rework their works too often, I imagine, but neither do they build on previous works the same way as software authors.

In the course of writing a piece of code, I have not infrequently had to rewrite the code multiple times during the initial phases (design, coding, unit testing), and less frequently during later phases (integrated testing). But if that's what is required to get the functionality correct, that's what I do. It's not that I tell my manager that's what I'm doing, nor that I don't tell my manager. It's just what I believe is the fastest way to get an accurate, reliable piece of functionality.

Larger (subsystem+) rewrites are much more rare. But, again, if that's what is required to get reliable, functional code, then that's what I do.

It is important, though, that you've learned from previous mistakes before going through a rewrite. In the initial phases, this is pretty trivial: you just wrote the non-working code, so rewriting it immediately should naturally incorporate what you've learned. For later phases, where there may have been a time span of a week, a month, or even a year, between write and rewrite, this can be much more difficult.

In reply to Re: rewrite: in literature and in coding by Tanktalus
in thread rewrite: in literature and in coding by johnnywang

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