> "Programming is not like building a house over and over again. If you 
> build
> your first house, you have no idea how long it will take to build a wall,
> make the roof or creating one square meter of floor.

I would say the analogy is being told to write a game in C++ and DirectX. 
Your first time, when you have no experience of either C++ or DirectX, is 
going to be a nightmare.  You will have no idea how long it will take, what 
is possible, what isn't possible, there will be lots of problems etc.

> Once you did all this,
> you know how long it took and when you build your second house, you know
> that it will take about as long as it did the first time, if not faster,
> since you are getting better at a task the more often you are doing it.

Yup, once you know how to code in C++ and use DirectX it becomes vastly 
quicker and more predictable to write a game, even if it's not an identical 
copy of your first attempt.

> Every piece of code you write is a *new* piece of code, you are never
> repeating the same task again. Why would you repeat the same task?

Because it needs to be slightly different?  Like an app that needs a GUI 
front end, not going to be the same as anything you've done before, but you 
know how to make one because you've done it before 100 times.  Ditto for a 
physics engine in a game, you know how to do it, but you might need to start 
again from scratch or modify your existing code because of some special 
requirement (eg it was a flight sim before but now you need car sim 
physics).  Or you need to read/write to a database, yes you know how to use 
mySQL already because you've done it before loads, but you still need to 
write some code again that you are familar with, it's not really new to you.

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