Charles Petzold Quotes

I originally studied graphic design and video production. I had wanted to be a programmer - I loved development and coding - but it turned out that I really enjoyed doing the frontend more than backend development.

I knew a lot about product design before coming to Apple, but I didn't understand a lot about consumer experience design, which is really Apple's forte.

IBM was the original contractor for much of the computer interface design on the film.

One of my most productive days was throwing away 1,000 lines of code.

I could open a thousand Excel documents and still never think to scroll past a wall of empty rows to see if, hidden beneath them, there is a tab I need to click. Just doesn't occur to me. Because, design.

APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.

I'm a great coder. But I am not pushing that so much anymore because there are thousands of great coders.

Once the product's task is known, design the interface first; then implement to the interface design.

I'm not the expert on the great gameplay. I come in for the character design, monsters, atmosphere. I'm not the technician.

When I am starting a new game, I have to program it for the Apple, because I want to get all of the markets.

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.

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.

Just how do I design if not with prototyping? An excellent question. The short answer is 'on paper.'

I have my team focused on the front end, working on the user experience, and making sure we have all the wiki-like tools people need to work on the site. We're just cranking away.

Developers, developers, developers...

There is a point in your life when you realize that you have written enough destructors.

Developers, developers, developers, developers.

All change is in the screen.

We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Programming is all about numbers.

As Mono matures, people will begin to use it to write desktop components that take advantage of all the hard work thats gone into some of the meatier GNOME libraries, as well as the nifty language features of C#.

As we said in the preface to the first edition, C "wears well as one's experience with it grows." With a decade more experience, we still feel that way.

Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse)

Developing a compiler was a logical move; but in matters like this, you don't run against logic - you run against people who can't change their minds.

Programming today is the opposite of diamond mining. In diamond mining you dig up a lot of dirt to find a small bit of value. With programming you start with the value, the real intention, and bury it in a bunch of dirt.