John Carmack Quotes

Focus is a matter of deciding what things you're not going to do.

In the information age, the barriers [to entry into programming] just aren't there. The barriers are self imposed. If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don't need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on, and the dedication to go through with it. We slept on floors. We waded across rivers.

Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal, and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better.

Sometimes, the elegant implementation is just a function. Not a method. Not a class. Not a framework. Just a function.

If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better.

Programming is not a zero-sum game. Teaching something to a fellow programmer doesn't take it away from you. I'm happy to share what I can, because I'm in it for the love of programming.

Low-level programming is good for the programmer's soul.

You can prematurely optimize maintainability, flexibility, security, and robustness just like you can performance.

Focused, hard work is the real key to success.

I recognize that I possess a very special intellect, but at the same time, I recognize that I'm lacking in a lot of areas. But being well-rounded is greatly overrated.

Rocket science has been mythologized all out of proportion to its true difficulty.

The cost of adding a feature isn't just the time it takes to code it. The cost also includes the addition of an obstacle to future expansion. ... The trick is to pick the features that don't fight each other.

The speed of light sucks.

If you're willing to restrict the flexibility of your approach, you can almost always do something better

Making one brilliant decision and a whole bunch of mediocre ones isn't as good as making a whole bunch of generally smart decisions throughout the whole process.

An interesting question: is it easier to motivate a learned individual that never does anything, or educate an ignorant individual that actually produces things?

It is not that uncommon for the cost of an abstraction to outweigh the benefit it delivers. Kill one today!

The Escalation programmers come from a completely different background, and the codebase is all STL this, boost that, fill-up-the-property list, dispatch the event, and delegate that. I had been harboring some suspicions that our big codebases might benefit from the application of some more of the various “modern” C++ design patterns, despite seeing other large game codebases suffer under them. I have since recanted that suspicion.

One of the big lessons of a big project is you don't want people that aren't really programmers programming, you'll suffer for it!

Because of the nature of Moore's law, anything that an extremely clever graphics programmer can do at one point can be replicated by a merely competent programmer some number of years later.

Note to self: Pasty-skinned programmers ought not stand in the Mojave desert for multiple hours.

Sharing the code just seems like The Right Thing to Do. It costs us rather little, but it benefits a lot of people in sometimes very significant ways. There are many university research projects, proof of concept publisher demos, and new platform test beds that have leveraged the code. Free software that people value adds wealth to the world.

The important point is that the cost of adding a feature isn't just the time it takes to code it. The cost also includes the addition of an obstacle to future expansion. Sure, any given feature list can be implemented, given enough coding time. But in addition to coming out late, you will usually wind up with a codebase that is so fragile that new ideas that should be dead-simple wind up taking longer and longer to work into the tangled existing web. The trick is to pick the features that don't fight each other.

I like to think I'm pretty good at what I do.

Honestly, I spend very little time thinking about past events, and I certainly don't have them ranked in any way. I look back and think that I have done a lot of good work over the years, but I am much more excited about what the future holds.