How to actually write a program?

[Phil Frost]

How does a composer write a song? He might know the overall sound of the
song, so he might start by playing it on a piano. Then he might work on
the strings part, and a general chord progression. Then add some
woodwinds, building the song piece by piece until all the small parts
are assembled to a greater whole.

Writing a program is no different. You must first break your song in to
parts. It's a highly creative process, and it's not something that can
be taught. Find yourself a nice, quiet room, and a time when you arn't
distracted by anything. Think of the greater problem and try to divide
it into smaller pieces. This division is the hardest part of
programming; expressing the ideas in code becomes as natural as speech
with practice. After some reflection your path should become clear.

On Fri, Sep 03, 2004 at 09:29:36PM +0000, Nick Evans wrote:
> Hello there,
> I have been on and off learning to code (with python being the second
> language I have worked on after a bit of BASIC). What I really want to know
> is, if you are going to actually write a program or a project of some sort,
> how do you actually start.
> 
> Picture this, you know what you want the program to do (its features), you
> have a possably rough idea of how the program will work. You have opened an
> empty text file and saved it as 'mykewlprogram.py' and now your sitting in
> front of an empty text file... Now then.... where do I start.
> 
> Any ideas about this problem :-)
> 
> Ta
> Nick