I guess it depends on the seriousness of what you're doing. In programming normal, non-critical code, Python and exploratory programming will speed you up quite

I guess it depends on the seriousness of what you're doing. In programming normal, non-critical code, Python and exploratory programming will speed you up quite a bit. But if most of your time is spent debugging, then taking your time is probably worth it. And use tools that makes a lot of bugs impossible: Use a memory-safe language with strong typing and concurrency abstractions that prevent data races etc. If you're making a big system where remembering where everything is is half the job, a good IDE with solid auto-complete might help. I'm a big fan of MS Visual Studio, though it has limited programming language support. I've heard good things about Intellij too. If most of the code will be written by someone else then you want an opinionated programming language that enforces a certain style, like Ada or Go. Finally, if your problem has already been solved, don't solve it again. Use Erlang for distributed systems, Ada for critical systems, Esterel for extra-critical systems that can afford to be slow, etc.