In reading this post, I was reminded of my days as a lawyer. My job then was basically to write compelling legal arguments. When I was a new associate, I was always annoyed at partners who would heavily edit my work. I knew what I had written was clear and persuasive, and I wasn’t too fond of them messing it up. After awhile, however, I learned that some people learn by doing. They weren’t re-writing my arguments to correct it, they were re-writing it as part of their process to understand it. When I became a senior associate reviewing others’ work, I often found myself doing the same thing, because it turns out it’s a pretty fast method of fulling coming to grips with the material.

My guess is that software is very similar. No matter how elegant or well-documented the code, many people will want to re-write it as part of their process of learning it. That doesn’t mean writing elegant or well-document code is unimportant, but rather is just one explanation of why some people are prone to wanting to re-write code than re-factor it.