Quotes

1. The ideal machine is a machine that performs its function but does not exist.
   — TRIZ: The Theory of Inventive Problem Solving

2. A little copying is better than a little dependency.
   — Rob Pike - www.youtube.com

3. Don’t panic.
   — Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

4. There is no doubt that the grail of efficiency leads to abuse. Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%. A good programmer will not be lulled into complacency by such reasoning, he will be wise to look carefully at the critical code; but only after that code has been identified.
   — Donald E. Knuth

5. The most dangerous phrase in the language is “We’ve always done it this way.”
   — Grace Hopper, Computerworld (January 1976)

6. It is far, far easier to make a correct program fast than it is to make a fast program correct.
   — H. Sutter and A. Alexandrescu, C++ Coding Standards: 101 Rules

7. Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
   — Frederick P. Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month

8. Explicit is better than implicit.
   — Tim Peters, The Zen of Python

9. I call it my billion-dollar mistake. At that time, I was designing the first comprehensive type system for references in an object-oriented language. My goal was to ensure that all use of references should be absolutely safe, with checking performed automatically by the compiler. But I couldn’t resist the temptation to put in a null reference, simply because it was so easy to implement. This has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years.
   — Tony Hoare, the inventor of null. “Null References: The Billion Dollar Mistake.” www.infoq.com