Oh, goodness, this one's easy for me. I wanted to be an economist and stopped taking economics classes at a local community college after I had taken all that they offered. One of the many interesting things about economics that I learned applied to programming was the following axiom:

It is always cheaper and faster to prevent a problem than to clean it up.

Any doctor will tell you that a vaccine is better than treating measles. Any environmental engineer can easily demonstrate the preventing pollution is cheaper than cleaning up the after-effects. Buying your spouse roses is cheaper than a divorce (look, just trust me on that one).

So how does that affect programming? You'll notice in all of the above examples that a little bit of extra work beforehand is required to enjoy the benefits. But many parents don't bother to get their children vaccinated. Many people don't bother to recycle. Many husbands have never bought their wife roses. Here's the relation to programming: how many programs have you seen where someone just hacked something together quickly and hoped it would work. 'strict' isn't used, globals are everywhere and no error checking is apparent. Such programs are usually a mess.

I don't know why it's so difficult to convince programmers to take the time to do it right, but then, I saw this all the time in economics. People are lazy (myself included!). We just don't want to bother to do things right the first time because it's extra work.

Cheers,
Ovid

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