Virtually 100% confirmation from my experience as well. I'll spend as much as 2, 3, or maybe even 4x the amount of time coding my projects to make the code and its built in documentation look as great as possible. This invaribly gets it working in about 20 to 50% of the time that it would take if I throw together some junk/crap that has to be reorganized and recoded several times before it is architected correctly.

If it happens that I have to take over code from somebody else, which does happen from time to time, I almost always go through and clean up ALL the code to make it be much better looking. In this process I gain a full understanding of how it works, where I can improve it, and how I can restructure it for the new features that have to be added. In the end it normally will look like I wrote it and documented it. Sometimes this process will reveal that the existing code is garbage and needs to be completely re-done. It can be hard to convince managers or clients to accept a decision to re-do everything but often if I simply show them how some past code of mine looks as compared to their existing code they see the light and agree to the code overhaul.

Michael Karas