When we see a world-class musician flawlessly play challenging music, it can betempting to imagine that they were always able to do so. A moment's thoughtmakes it obvious that they must have had to spend huge amounts of timepractising basic techniques in order to reach that level. One thing that mostof us don't consider is that they have to continue spending considerableamounts of time simply to maintain that technique, let alone expand it.In contrast, in programming, we have only a haphazard notion of how one shouldgo about obtaining sufficient technique to become good enough to write goodsoftware; and we have almost no notion of continued practise to maintain orexpand that technique.