I was always a fairly disorganized programmer, TBH, and still am … but I ended up with tight code at the end of it. My IBM Assembly Language card decks were a quarter the size of others in the class. 25 years later, I reduced 4,000 lines of SAS code to 1,600. Later, in Mathematica, I zeroed in on flexible interfaces and modularity, still without planning everything in advance.
In Scrivener, I urge people to try something new every day in Compile, long before exports are needed, and iterate to a final workflow. That’s a disorganized approach, in a way, but it works in the long run.
What I hate is the process I often see, when users have no idea what to call anything. What they’re saying, if it’s clear, isn’t true or if it’s true, it’s the farthest thing from clear. Seeing it happen in front of me clears it up marvelously.
My reference was to the type of programming that was all tactics but no strategy. And it ended up wasting a lot of time. Just as you would write an outline to a story you should have some idea of what your code structure should be according to what you want to accomplish. You may have to adjust the plan as you go but you should at least have a plan.
In my programming days I was methodical and put in a lot of comments so that I could understand what the code meant the next day, what to speak of the next year. Whereas, I sometimes had to deal with spaghetti code that others wrote that was unintelligible to the original authors yet I had spend a lot of time sussing it out to be able to use it.
Because I was methodical and tested my code it was reported to me that during the lifespan of that software only one legitimate bug was reported. Thus, very little time spent in debugging the software after it hit the market.
Funnily enough, there is a “Scrivener” for programmers. It combines the concept of outlining with content creation, like Scrivener does, but unlike Scrivener is designed for generating whole directory structures of files rather than one big file, as a programmer would need. I once used it for creating websites, way back in the day, I think even before Scrivener was an idea.
So yes, one could be a plotter or a pantser programmer with that.
