The Pragmatic Programmer: your journey to mastery, 20th Anniversary Edition, 2nd Edition
by David Thomas, Andrew Hunt
Chapter 7While You Are Coding
Conventional wisdom says that once a project is in the coding phase, the work is mostly mechanical, transcribing the design into executable statements. We think that this attitude is the single biggest reason that software projects fail, and many systems end up ugly, inefficient, poorly structured, unmaintainable, or just plain wrong.
Coding is not mechanical. If it were, all the CASE tools that people pinned their hopes on way back in the early 1980s would have replaced programmers long ago. There are decisions to be made every minute—decisions that require careful thought and judgment if the resulting program is to enjoy a long, accurate, and productive life.
Not all decisions are even conscious. You can better ...
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