In my intro comp-sci classes years and years ago, my professor used to describe this as the difference between "hacking" and "software engineering". "Hacking" was the interative try/fail/fix cycle, driven more by intuition than by design. "Software engineering" was supposed to replace that by designing it right the first time so that debugging was errors in coding, not errors in design.

Ironically -- or maybe intentionally -- test-driven-development is just a structured (software engineering) approach to the "try/fail/fix" cycle:

-xdg

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In reply to Re: brilliance or... easy erasure? by xdg
in thread brilliance or... easy erasure? by samizdat

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