Steve Jobs on programmer productivity

Steve Jobs discussing programmer productivity in his keynote Q&A from the 1997 WWDC:

The way you get programmer productivity is not by increasing the lines of code per programmer per day. That doesn’t work. The way you get programmer productivity is by eliminating lines of code you have to write.

The line of code that’s the fastest to write, that never breaks, that doesn’t need maintenance, is the line you never had to write.

This isn’t the only gem from that keynote. The entire thing is fantastic and worth watching, if only to see in hindsight what an amazing product visionary Steve is.

In this unrehearsed Q&A session (not a prepared presentation), he lays out many of the ideas that will chart Apple’s course for the next 15 years. Mac OS X, iLife, Xcode, MobileMe, iCloud, and even the iPhone and iPad—the seeds of all of these ideas were clearly already present in Steve’s mind.

Incredible.