“The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material”

— Michelangelo

Writing software is commonly viewed as an additive art form, where you decide how to compose material together and build “up” something, such as in pottery, painting, architecture, etc.

I would claim, actually, that while coding appears additive (you type and put lines of code where there was once a blank file), it is actually subtractive like sculpture. You are revealing the system within the block of marble.

You chisel away with every decision, which cut off chunks of possibility-space. You decide how to separate subdomains of a problem. You decide their relationships to each other. You refactor until you’re left with a work of art, lopping off confusion and misconceptions here and there.

Refactoring is chiseling away your own misconceptions to reveal the design