It's true! How do you think Wikipedia got to the amazingly useful and mature state that it's in? Or GNU/Linux? Or ... (there's just so many examples)...
How do you think books are written? All in one sitting? No! They're the result of many many many many iterations/drafts/refinements. (Partly because inspiration for what to write comes in many spurts, not all at once for the entire book...)
Inclusive-of but non-restrictive category:
Software development philosophy edit (Category edit)
- small changes
- refinements
- gradual changes
- iterations
- many of them
- successively
- cumulative effect
Why?
- It's hard to make "big changes", or at least to make them successfully. It just doesn't work like that. Many things that are called "big changes" are nothing more than the many small changes combined into one big change.
- Time constraints: Sometimes that's all you can do. You don't have time to make big sweeping changes, only time to make little changes here and there.
- "Agile development" -- sometimes/often seeing what you have / previous design/implementation attempts inform the next step you take -- i.e., you figure out what path you want to take "as you go"
- Bugs (software development): making too many changes too quickly leads to things breaking, bugs being re-introduced; hence TDD, regression testing, etc.
- The creative process doesn't work in an "all-at-once" way.
- Ideas come at inopportune times.
- Review (critical, objective review) requires a waiting/away/stewing/sitting period in which time you let your work (whatever it may be -- a paper you're writing, an e-mail, software, ...) sit/stew without you looking at it. Then you can come back to it anew with a "fresh [objective?] perspective".
Aliases: Creation through making many iterative refinements yields superior results, Many iterations produce superior results