There's a story of Donald Knuth and the programming contest:
“In the early days of Silicon Valley, there was an annual programming contest on Memorial Day. When Donald Knuth (the world’s greatest programmer) entered, they gave him an old batch computer to work on. He had to carry punch cards back and forth. The others, great programmers of the time like Alan Kay, John McCarthy; got the ‘modern’ time-sharing systems.
“Donald Knuth had that old, punch card computer, but finished his program an hour before anyone else, and his algorithm was the fastest executing. They asked him how he did it so well, and he said, `With that kind of computer, you think carefully before typing. You don’t want to make mistakes, like carving in stone.”
Sounds like your old programming friend has learned that lesson.
Programming is more like modelling clay rather than carving stone.
You can, and you should, always slowly reshape your creation until you are satisfied with the result.
If you are carving stone there is no way that you can change it without destroying everything and starting again.
You may be faster just using a lot of time thinking before writing the code, but you will never see the real essence that is revealed only while you are continuously moulding your creation.
To me it always happens that after days or weeks or even months that I don't look at some part of my code I find a better way of doing it.
One way that would have never been apparent without the code being in that current form.
“In the early days of Silicon Valley, there was an annual programming contest on Memorial Day. When Donald Knuth (the world’s greatest programmer) entered, they gave him an old batch computer to work on. He had to carry punch cards back and forth. The others, great programmers of the time like Alan Kay, John McCarthy; got the ‘modern’ time-sharing systems.
“Donald Knuth had that old, punch card computer, but finished his program an hour before anyone else, and his algorithm was the fastest executing. They asked him how he did it so well, and he said, `With that kind of computer, you think carefully before typing. You don’t want to make mistakes, like carving in stone.”
Sounds like your old programming friend has learned that lesson.