looking at shit i wrote last september really blows my mind at how bad a coder i was before.

and it's not like i'm real greenhorn, either... i've been in this biz for about five years now.

could it be that i'm just a late bloomer? that it's taken me five years what most get to in two?

could it be that i've finally got around to breaking all my bad scripting habits now that i'm actually coding in a true OOP environment?

i feel this urge to go back and rewrite all that crap i shat out before...

anybody else notice such vast improvement over so short a time?

> i feel this urge to go back and rewrite all that
> crap i shat out before...

Don't bother. You may feel the same in another 6 months about what you are doing now.

If you're any good, you'll encounter this phenomenon every couple of months.

What amazes me is how much code we can create in a few years, though the reaction of "my code was crap" is comprehensible because it's not always that we have the architecture right in the first place. Thus, upon seeing a second time the code some time after, we see where we could have done better. And you know what's amazing about that? The best programmers and the best projects do get cleaned up from time to time; it's what I would like to call "Bonsai Programming", which is the Japanese philosophy for doing a little bit everyday and creating marvelous little trees that way -- and for us programmers, what's prettier than a nice tree of source code?! :-) Maybe a tree of money or blonde women, whatever your taste.

The important thing is getting the architecture right, as the code can be improved later if need be.

As for being amazed by OOP: don't. OOP is just an approach to problem solving, which many times make the code just as hard to follow, and it has its cost, also. OOP is better for code that can be easily reused, but many times that's not possible in frontend programming, which is code to solve a problem only, like providing a GUI for a user to edit some data. Hardcore OOP programming can become pretty outdated from Windows Vista on, because it will provide many easy tools to create the frontend programming, with visual designers and easy database access integrated; that is, even though in the first years only a few lucky programmers will be able to use only the Windows Vista technologies, but just like ActiveX, they will be used a lot once we give it a couple of years.

Whenever someone tells me that this or that code looks like shit, I usually reply that ALL code not written by me and within three months looks like shit to me.

"If you're any good, you'll encounter this phenomenon every couple of months."

Yep... now just start improving the areas that need improvement and you'll be in good shape.