This was one of my first programs—it was something like K equals grab the next char. Then I said if K equals “a”, print “a”; if K is “b”, print “b”. I pretty much did every letter, number, and some punctuation. Then at one point I was like, “Wait, I could just say, 'Print the variable!'” and I replaced 40 lines of code with one. I was like, “Holy shit, that was awesome!” That was some major abstraction for a six-year-old.

Fitzpatrick: Yeah, I worked at Tektronix for a while. Before I had any official job, I got some hosting account. I got kicked off of AOL for writing bots, flooding their chat rooms, and just being annoying. I was scripting the AOL client from another Windows program. I also wrote a bot to flood their online form to send you a CD. I used every variation of my name, because I didn't want their duplicate suppression to only send me one CD, because they had those 100 free hours, or 5,000 free hours. I submitted this form a couple thousand times and for a week or so the postman would be coming with bundles of CDs wrapped up.

My mom was like, “Damn it, Brad, you're going to get in trouble.” I was like, “Eh—their fucking fault, right?” Then one day I get a phone call and I actually picked up the phone, which I normally didn't, and it was someone from AOL. They were just screaming at me. “Stop sending us all these form submissions!” I'm not normally this quick and clever, but I just yelled back, “Why are you sending me all this crap? Every day the postman comes! He's dropping off all these CDs!” They're like, “We're so sorry, sir. It won't happen again.” Then I used all those and I decorated my dorm room in college with them. I actually still have them in a box in the garage. I can't get rid of them because I just remember them being such a good decoration at one point.

Fitzpatrick: I don't mind it. The syntax is terrible and totally inconsistent and the error messages, at least from GCC, are ridiculous. You can get 40 pages of error spew because you forgot some semicolon. But—like anything else—you quickly memorize all the patterns. You don't even read the words; you just see the structure and think, “Oh, yeah, I probably forgot to close the namespace in a header file.” I think the new C++ spec, even though it adds so much complexity, has a lot of stuff that'll make it less painful to type—as far as number of keystrokes. The auto variables and the for loops. It's more like Python style. And the lambdas. It's enough that I could delude myself into thinking I'm writing in Python, even though it's C++.

Seibel: What do you think is the most important skill for a programmer to have?

Fitzpatrick: Thinking like a scientist; changing one thing at a time. Patience and trying to understand the root cause of things. Especially when you're debugging something or designing something that's not quite working. I've seen young programmers say, “Oh, shit, it doesn't work,” and then rewrite it all. Stop. Try to figure out what's going on. Learn how to write things incrementally so that at each stage you could verify it.