I think he's saying he works on the code for long periods of time before worrying about how running it works out. Then he just tweaks the bits that are off and goes about his business.
Funny, that's exactly how I work with Fortran (2008). And I have Syntastic in Vim nag me every time I save if I made a mistake that the compiler catches. A great advantage over C/C++ is that even on 30 000+ LoC projects split into many files, compiling from clean takes less than 30 seconds. "implicit none", of course.
Nope, what Rapzid said. My code very rarely compiles first try, but when it does I have a strong amount of certainty that it will work. So I only have to run it a few times a day to check on the output, rather than every single time I compile it. Nobody said anything about releasing it without running it.