One of my most productive days was throwing away 1,000 lines of code.
The Wesnoth devs are good but not exceptionally so, and we're weighed down by a crappy implementation language (C++). Nevertheless our productivity, in terms of goals achieved per hour of work, is quite high.
It's probably fair to say that the ratio of time our Connector developers spend in the debugger versus the Emacs buffer is higher than with most software.
I have the ability to get code done, but I'm impatient, and it's scrappy as a result. Maybe that helped me with 'Minecraft,' as it came quickly. But, well, at some point, I'd like to actually become a good programmer.
When you're designing and inventing the way I did, every minute of your life is put - every neuron in your brain into trying to think about the little code and how you can maybe have one less line of code and a little bit more straightforward from the beginning to the answer. And you don't have time to think about companies and products and how would I build this. So Steve Jobs and I were a very necessary pair.
Computer languages differ not so much in what they make possible, but in what they make easy.
Blend is great for designers because it implements a lot of sophisticated behaviours, but for what I like to do, hand coding XAML is preferable, particularly because I have to publish it.
SQL, Lisp, and Haskell are the only programming languages that I've seen where one spends more time thinking than typing.
Perl should remain fast and intuitive (to the extent that it is :-)
Here's the secret that every successful software company is based on: You can domesticate programmers the way beekeepers tame bees. You can't exactly communicate with them, but you can get them to swarm in one place and when they're not looking, you can carry off the honey.
A great coder can easily be 50 times more productive than a mediocre one, while bad ones ultimately have negative productivity.
Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.
