Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming

by Peter Seibel

I do a design of the future version of the program. Knowing what I know now, this is how the program would have looked, now at the program level rather than at a subroutine level. Now when you go to fix a bug and you have a choice on how to fix it, fix it moving toward the better model. Don't just fix it in the shortest way. Don't just fix it in the way that fits, but move it toward the other model so that over several months instead of the program getting more and more mired in patches fixing up the stuff that was old and wrong, all the critical parts of the program all of a sudden look like they're the new way of doing things.

Cossel