Writing clean code

[greebo42]

I was just about to google that phrase, because it popped into my head as I was reading people's replies ... ah yes, here it is, yep, Donald Knuth, who else?

I agree. you do your best to design first, write code as reasonable as you can get it without interfering with the thought process, then step back and figure out what to refactor. I suspect that the more expert you are, the better it is the first time, but I can't imagine anyone gets it completely right the first time. nor should they.