Plan 9 and GNU Herd vs Linux.
Spring vs EJB.
Rest vs Soap vs CORBA.
C vs Algol.
It's easier to do something simple and iterate on it than to do something perfect from the start.
Rather the whole point here is that when learning it's better to focus on quantity over quality AND by doing so that quality will naturally be better. The parent is looking for examples of this latter idea.
But let's take the idea to the extreme, imagine we are building an system, one team starts building and improving on the design for 6 months. Other team builds and starts anew every 2 weeks. Who would have a better system at the end of 6 months? Tough to tell, the iterative one will probably build it from the ground in a better way with less technical debt but who will have a more complete system or more features.
I also think it's being misapplied when put into a completely different context. Teamwork, not students learning, project that is harder to start again and slower to iterate that way etc. I'm not sure we should consider every piece of advice as being some how completely universal.
We could also overthink it in the other direction. The students themselves could have come to the conclusion that the best way to get quality was lots of practice and made lots of pots or parts of pots until they had perfected pot making and merely presented the final result. Whereas the students that went for quantity merely made a load of crap pots. Same lesson but roles reversed.
Agreed. There's a lot of pedants on HN who have what I call "the Snopes illness."
This is basically agile vs waterfall.
Iterating on a project is definitely a great way to learn about it, refine how you make it and accrete complexity. So it can but doesn't necessarily have to encompass both ideas.
I also think that whilst it's tempting to stretch the anecdote to fit all sorts of ideas it's particularly unhelpful when trying to discuss the idea it actually references.
Perhaps it would be best to iterate fast early on in the project, throw away a couple of weeks with PoCs and then go for the big one.
EDIT: Ah, you mean the order is different :)
- C++
- CMake
- PHP
- Postscript
And it can work well:
- TeX
- Git (not the later additions)
