…When I was younger, I would do the all-night hacks, programming to four in the morning and you get really tired and it’s macho programming—you hack the code in hour after hour. And it’s not going well and you persevere and you get it working. And I would program when the intuition wasn’t there.
And what I’ve learned is, programming when you’re tired, you write crap and you throw it all away the next day. And 20 years ago I would program although I was getting a strong feeling that this isn’t right—there’s something wrong with this code. I have noticed over the years, the really good code I would write was when I’m in complete flow—just totally unaware of time: not even really thinking about the program, just sitting there in a relaxed state just typing this stuff and watching it come out on the screen as I type it in. That code’s going to be OK. The stuff where you can’t concentrate and something’s saying, “No, no, no, this is wrong, wrong, wrong”—I was ignoring that years ago. And I’d throw it all away. Now I can’t program anymore if it says, “No.” I just know from experience, stop— don’t write code. Stop with the problem. Do something else.
” Joe Armstrong (from: Coders at work)