Nicholas Negroponte Quotes

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

The best way to figure out how something works is to try to build it from scratch.

You need to make mistakes in rehearsal because that's how you find out what works and what doesn't.

Writing software is a very intense, very personal thing. You have to have time to work your way through it, to understand it. Then debug it.

People think that computer science is the art of geniuses but the actual reality is the opposite, just many people doing things that build on eachother, like a wall of mini stones.

In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word 'frustration'.

I really liked figuring things out on my own. Early on in the development of a new version of Windows, I would explore it, I would try out various things, I would see what worked, I would see what didn't work.

One of the advantages of moving quickly is if you do something wrong you can change it. What technologies tend to do is they tend to make a lot of mistakes... but then we go back and aggressively attack those mistakes - and fix them. And you usually recover pretty quickly.

Experience teaches slowly, and at the cost of mistakes.

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

Think small. Don't pretend you know the answers. Experiment; get feedback. These are all the premises of 'Think Like a Freak,' really.

I enjoy evangelizing Java. In my heart of hearts, I'm an engineer, and what makes me happy is building something that works and having someone use it. That's cool.

Depending on the kind of code you write, depending on the kind of ideas you have, you can be creative in problem-solving and you can really make things work in a very gratifying way.

Design, refine and repeat, and keep learning all the way along. It sounds bland and pedestrian, but in fact, it's the reverse.

When you're first starting a show, any show, you learn what works and what doesn't work, and it's a kind of trial and error thing.

It's important to learn from your mistakes and then to refine.

I'm a common sense person who tries to analyze and I have to look at all sides of the issue because you don't want software that only does something but doesn't fix the other errors.

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.

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

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.

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

It is not a simple matter to differentiate unsuccessful from successful experiments. . . .[Most] work that is finally successful is the result of a series of unsuccessful tests in which difficulties are gradually eliminated.

No one is exempt from the rule that learning occurs through recognition of error.

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

Life is an error-making and an error-correcting process.