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Ask HN: Have you ever written (extensive) code that works the first time?

3 points by jmonegro ↗ HN
As I continue down a little project of mine, I realized that I've never written an app that works completely the first time I run it.<p>I wondered if it was my incompetence/lack of experience/ignorance/etc., or if it was a common phenomenon.

13 comments

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JCThoughtscream
I suspect the problem is much like with literary writing:

The first draft is NEVER perfect.

pg
I think the longest thing I've written that worked the first time was a Pascal program about a page or two long, in college. I'm never likely to surpass that record, because I'd never write so much code now before testing it.
statictype
I always wondered, what does it mean for a program to be a page long? I guess you're referring to a printout of the code on A4 size paper in some fixed 10-point font?
vena
25 lines of 80 characters, i'd say.
thwarted
When I absolutely had to print out code, 17+ years ago, I remember it being 66 lines on a US letter sized sheet (don't care to calculate what pitch that would be, or the font size -- whatever HP LaserJets would print by default if you sent plain text ASCII data to port 9100 directly. My university also had those terrible green banded fan-fold paper line-printers that was like 200 columns wide and maybe 80-100 lines. We referred to both of these as "pages".

Now, I don't know anyone who measures code in "pages". This isn't a good metric when most projects are made up of multiple files. It's as good as measuring productivity in LOC.

pg
Yes, I was thinking of 66 lines.
cperciva
I've written modules of 500-1000 lines which worked perfectly the first time I successfully compiled it. In any large block of code, I'm prone to make occasional typos (usually missing semicolons, unmatched parentheses, not declaring a temporary variable, not #including a required header, etc.) but the compiler always finds those for me, so it's not really a problem.

I've also written code which didn't work at all, and then spent days debugging it. But I've learned that I'm really bad at debugging code, so instead I take the time to plan out what my code is doing so that I can get it right the first time.

jrp
Never the first time I think about a problem. But sometimes when doing a from-scratch rewrite of a medium-size program, I will understand how everything should be, and it works the first time.
jerome_etienne
no, simply because writting extensive code without running it is silly from a developement time point of view. It would uselessly increase the distance between writing the bug and finding it.
ratsbane
I have done that. Very rarely, but when it happens it's like the rain stops, the clouds part and the sun illuminates the countryside with a fresh spring warmth.

And then there are days I've hacked through some muddy recursive reference problem in a few lines of code, just knowing the solution should be obvious but not seeing it.

The good moments make me happy to program; the bad ones make me think about becoming a lumberjack instead.

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