John Carmack discusses the art and science of software engineering

In try­ing to make the games faster, which has to be our pri­or­ity going forward, we’ve made a lot of mis­takes already with Doom 4, a lot of it is water under the bridge, but prioritizing that can help us get the games done faster, just has to be where we go. Because we just can’t do this going, you know, six more years, what­ever, between games.

On the software development side, you know there was an interesting thing at E3, one of the interviews I gave, I had mentioned some­thing about how, you I’ve been learning a whole lot, and I'm a better programmer now than I was a year ago and the interviewer expressed a lot of surprise at that, you know after 20 years and going through all of this that you’d have it all figured out by now, but I actually have been learning quite a bit about software development, both on the personal craftsman level but also paying more attention by what it means on the team dynamics side of things. And this is something I probably avoided looking at squarely for years because, it’s nice to think of myself as a scientist engineer sort, dealing in these things that are abstract or provable or objective on there and there.

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