Charles Petzold Quotes

It was a long period of time where I tried to figure out what worked, what didn't work.

Most intuitive ideas have to be clarified, so there is a trial and error process.

My strong feeling is that we must learn more about how we learn. I'm convinced that we learn by struggling to find the solution to a problem on our own with some guidance, but getting in and getting our hands dirty and working it.

I don't know exactly how it's done. I let it alone a good deal.

The process of debugging, going an correcting the program and then looking at the behavior, and then correcting it again, and finally iteratively getting it to a working program, is in fact, very close to learning about learning.

In school we learn that mistakes are bad, and we are punished for making them. Yet, if you look at the way humans are designed to learn, we learn by making mistakes. We learn to walk by falling down. If we never fell down, we would never walk.

Children are just little scientists.

I think the philosophy will continue to be what it always was; which was, let's keep throwing a bunch of things at the wall, and see what sticks.

No one's going to see my mistakes; I just need the safety of these mistakes to lead me to the right answers.

In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.

You try a lot of things and you don't know what the hell you're doing. If you're actually inventing something you shouldn't know what you're doing.

Just build things and find out if they work.

In order to learn, you have to be free. You have to be free to experiment, free to try, free to make mistakes.

It is most important in creative science not to give up. If you are an optimist you will be willing to "try" more than if you are a pessimist.

I teach something called The Law of Probabilities, which says the more things you try, the more likely one of them will work. The more books you read, the more likely one of them will have an answer to a question that could solve the major problems of your life.. make you wealthier, solve a health problem, whatever it might be.

I like to really spend the time and figure it out and rehearsal is to try something that doesn't work. It's hard to do that, because you always want to go with your impulse thought and you wonder if that's the one, did that work, you know?

Instead of writing it wrong six times and then writing it right, I think it wrong six times and then write it right the seventh time.

All great discoveries...are products as much of doubt as of certainty, and the two in opposition clear the air for marvelous accidents.

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it; if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something. The millions who are in want will not stand by silently forever while the things to satisfy their needs are within easy reach.

There is no map, and charting a path ahead will not be easy. We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment.

To be an inventor, you have to be willing to live with a sense of uncertainty, to work in this darkness and grope towards an answer, to put up with anxiety about whether there is an answer.

Don't be afraid to stumble. Any inventor will tell you that you don't follow a plan far before you strike a snag. If, out of 100 ideas you get one that works, it's enough.

Many of us have created lives that give very little support for experimentation. We believe that answers already exist out there, independent of us. What if we invested more time and attention to our own experimentation? We could focus our efforts on discovering solutions that work uniquely for us.

When you don't know what to do, try something; if that doesn't work, try something else.

People try new things all the time. By now, the people who succeed have to be very sophisticated.