Nat Friedman Quotes

The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements.

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

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.

If you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

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.

There's no such thing as a simple cache bug.

System debugging has always been a graveyard-shift occupation, like astronomy.

If you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging, they should not introduce the bugs to start with.

If there is a bug in your code than you have to drop everything you're doing and go fix it.

The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating systems.

I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say Yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that. I'll just restart Apache every 10 requests.

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.

Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.

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

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.

Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.

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.

There is an incredibly large spectrum of possible causes for program bugs, including simple typos, "thinkos," hidden limitations of underlying abstractions, and outright bugs in abstractions or their implementation.

If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent."

Developers, developers, developers...

Learning to program has no more to do with designing interactive software than learning to touch type has to do with writing poetry

Learning to write programs stretches your mind, and helps you think better, creates a way of thinking about things that I think is helpful in all domains.

Developers, developers, developers, developers.

Another effective [debugging] technique is to explain your code to someone else. This will often cause you to explain the bug to yourself. Sometimes it takes no more than a few sentences, followed by an embarrassed "Never mind, I see what's wrong. Sorry to bother you." This works remarkably well; you can even use non-programmers as listeners. One university computer center kept a teddy bear near the help desk. Students with mysterious bugs were required to explain them to the bear before they could speak to a human counselor.

Perl programming is an *empirical* science!