>> Nowadays nobody barely thinks about their work before they start writing code, for the most part.
I am old enough to remember where this came from...
I used to do C for quite a while, then I made my hobby (Perl and scripting) my day job.
If given a certain size of a problem while working alone, I used to sit down and think for 1/2 a day or so, then develop (coding and also thinking more) for a week or two.
After I went scripting, this didn't work.
Since I could over an afternoon throw together a solution to the same size of problem which took a week in C, it was just not realistic to think first!
The best solution was to throw something together, look at it and then rewrite it if I didn't like it. The sheer development speed felt like I had gotten a sports car.
Absolutely agreed... prototype-morph-prod is a faster cycle.. but on the same lines, it means automated unit tests are more important the more complex projects get. Which is why modular code and testing work really well with scripting environments, and computing is fast enough.
With a modular approach, it also becomes easier to scale horizontally either in the same server/system or a separate server/system. Either via HTTP, TCP, 0mq or another abstraction, if the interfaces are the same, the modular layers can be replaced. This gets easier with async by default environments (node.js, golang, etc), and I find it to be much harder with classic N-Tier (.Net, Java). I'd rather use 0mq with node than wcf with .Net any day of the week.
I am old enough to remember where this came from...
I used to do C for quite a while, then I made my hobby (Perl and scripting) my day job.
If given a certain size of a problem while working alone, I used to sit down and think for 1/2 a day or so, then develop (coding and also thinking more) for a week or two.
After I went scripting, this didn't work.
Since I could over an afternoon throw together a solution to the same size of problem which took a week in C, it was just not realistic to think first!
The best solution was to throw something together, look at it and then rewrite it if I didn't like it. The sheer development speed felt like I had gotten a sports car.