Get the syntax correct now, not later.

[From "Programming Proverbs" by Henry Ledgard.]

"Proverb 9: Get the syntax correct now, not later."

"You can and should write programs that are completely free of syntactic errors on the first trial run. I mean it. It can be done, but you first must convince yourself that you indeed can do it. If that doesn’t impress you, think of all the hours of turnaround time or on-line debugging time you can waste tracking down the errors."

With today’s faster machines and integrated development environments there is a great temptation to let the compiler find the syntax problems and just "code like crazy"; you do what you do best and let the machine do what it does best. But … isn’t it odd that you’d call "generating syntax errors" what you do best?